Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond 9780300275001

Citation preview

Death Glitch

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D E AT H G L I T C H

HOW TECHNO-SOLUTIONISM FAILS US IN THIS LIFE AND BEYOND

TAMARA KNEESE

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2023 by Tamara Kneese. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@ yale.edu (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Gotham and Adobe Garamond types by IDS Infotech Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-24827 2 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947350 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Avi Theodore

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Social Memorials

1 30

2 Networked Death

63

3 Disrupted Inheritance

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4 Haunted Objects

141

Conclusion

182

Notes

197

Bibliography

219

Index

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Acknowledgments

Books are always collaborative efforts, and this one is no different. I especially want to thank all the people whose stories formed the basis of this work. Without their generosity, my book would not exist. This project has been a slow-cooking one, starting as a seminar paper and becoming my master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, advised by William Mazzarella, before winding up as my dissertation at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. There my work grew under the wise mentorship of Erica Robles-Anderson and from conversations with many other faculty (Jack Bratich, Gabriella Coleman, Faye Ginsburg, Angela Zito, Marita Sturken, and Finn Brunton), committee members (Mara Mills, Michael Ralph, Alexander Galloway, Fred Turner, and Shannon Lee Dawdy), and fellow students at NYU and beyond. My fellow graduate students were a source of support, especially Kari Hensley, Lana Lin, Carlin Wing, Kavita Kulkarni, Jacob Gaboury, Matthew Hockenberry, Jess Feldman, Liz Koslov, Hi’ilei Hobart, and Xiaochang Li. Hannah Zeavin read the earliest version of this book’s introduction, and both her suggestions and her camaraderie in early parenthood were invaluable. Luke Stark also provided thoughtful feedback and necessary commiseration. Beza Merid is a brilliant and trusted collaborator. Many friends from the Graduate Student Organizing Committee–UAW graduate employee labor union at NYU are lifelong comrades: Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Rana Jaleel, Alex Pittman, Andy Cornell, Michael Palm, and Jen Ayres, to name a few.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Financial support from a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and the School for Advanced Research gave me time and space to conduct research and workshop chapters. This work benefited from feedback from NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge Oikos, the Sigtuna Foundation’s Digital Existence II: Precarious Media Life conference, the Bard Graduate Center, Duke University’s Ethnography Workshop, Carleton University’s Into the Air symposium, and many other forums in which I presented various versions of chapters or scattered thoughts. Thanks to fellow “death-y” scholars, including Benjamin J. Peters, John Durham Peters, Megan Yip, Margaret Schwartz, Jed Brubaker, Abou Farman, Stephanie Schiavenato, Edina Harbinja, Theo Karatzas, Jacqueline Wernimont, Tonia Sutherland, and Marika Cifor, for your moral support. And thank you to everyone who was part of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, and especially to Melissa Gregg; the experiment is over, but the network lives on. Thanks to Joe Calamia for seeing this project’s potential and to Lana Swartz for recommending Yale University Press as a home for my work. I am so appreciative of the care that Jaya Chatterjee and Eva Skewes, along with the rest of YUP’s team, took in getting my manuscript over the finish line. Anonymous reviewers also offered generous advice that strengthened my arguments. University of San Francisco colleagues supported my work as an assistant professor, as did funding from our Faculty Development Fund. Laura Portwood-Stacer’s feedback on my proposal and the entire manuscript draft was critical. She is a magician and a treasure. Special thanks to my University of San Francisco Full Time Faculty Association union pals, media studies colleagues, and especially Inna Arzumanova.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to kind early readers and dear friends, including Liz Lopatto, Ella Butler, Beth Semel, Alex Hanna, Yindi Pei, Émeline Brulé, Angelina Muffelletto, Meghan Marohn, Danny Spitzberg, and Dorothy Santos. In my family, the dead have always been as present as the living, so writing about death came naturally to me. My parents, Cathy and Ken, and my brother, Sean, supported me at every step. Thanks to Todd for his unwavering enthusiasm, to Garbo for the snuggles, and to Avi for making it all worthwhile.

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Death Glitch

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Introduction

Zine-like collages of photos and handwritten notes are intermixed with green-on-black computer text and references to early internet subcultures. Paul Lindner is speaking in front of clippings of his Usenet correspondence with his wife, Julie Lindner, and other mementos from their long life together. Julie died of breast cancer in 2019, and Paul used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to revive the digital remnants of their shared life.1 In a video produced by the Internet Archive and featured on its website, Paul describes the excavation process: “I had to really go out and find it.”2 Behind him are church pews filled with ceramic replicas of past Internet Archive supporters; many of the Internet Archive’s massive servers are housed in a former Christian Science church in San Francisco. Here, both the sanctity and the intrinsic physicality of data are well represented. Paul is a longtime web decentralization activist. As a Google software engineer who was part of the team behind the now defunct social network Google+, which was at one point a competitor of Facebook, Paul is well aware of the problem of depending on corporate platforms and their changing policies to preserve the data of the deceased. Platforms wither and die, just like people. When the consumer version of Google+ folded, Paul suggested holding a wake to honor the dead platform.3 Paul laments that when it comes to internet infrastructures, people tend to forget even the recent past.4 Nonprofit organizations like

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Ceramic figures of Internet Archive associates lining the church pews (Photograph by Tamara Kneese, October 10, 2014)

the Internet Archive cannot capture everything. Systematically preserving private Facebook or Discord messages is difficult, access to photo-sharing platforms can always be revoked, and domain names change hands. When Paul created a memorial website for Julie, julieslife.com, he found that two other women named Julie had used that domain before; he was building on top of their digital traces. In a post he wrote for the Internet Archive, he refers to the domain as “hallowed ground.”5 All that people might have left of their digital memories are their own screenshots, themselves subject to decay.6 Paul has a server in his garage that contains many of his digital memories with Julie. He worries that after he dies, a Linux-proficient friend will have

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Internet Archive servers, intermittently flashing blue (Photograph by Tamara Kneese, October 10, 2014)

to maintain the server and that a family member who does not appreciate its significance might think the server is junk and throw it away. “If someone isn’t willing to do the work, memorialization is not going to happen,” Paul told me. After a person’s death, transient communications and platformdependent profiles can become sacred relics. The production and upkeep of digital remains depend on human and nonhuman actors, from commercial platforms’ terms of service, operating systems, and servers to social networks of commenters, mutuals, and surviving loved ones. But despite the technological interventions of major platforms and startup companies alike, there is no clean mechanism for

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passing digital belongings from one generation to the next. Death is a moment of breakdown that makes these tenuous networked relationships impossible to ignore. This book shows how the rapid pace of startup culture and the apparent ephemerality of social media are at odds with the lasting social value of digital objects. Death Glitch is based on more than sixty qualitative interviews with technologists, transhumanists, and digital caregivers over the course of fifteen years. Like all other aspects of human life, death is a social and collective experience, but because most tech platforms are fundamentally driven by commercial profit and individualistic understandings of what it means to be human, the technical solutions they offer around death will always be incommensurable with the problems they are attempting to solve. When death occurs for users and platforms, it becomes a kind of glitch that reveals needs that designers did not originally consider. Death glitches lay bare what was previously unseen or unaccounted for.7 The book is centered on the tensions inherent to managing the death and decay underlying the internet: tensions between technologists and ordinary users, between platform ephemerality and digital persistence, and between short-term gains and long-term futures. I examine four key permutations of the platform infrastructures of digital legacy, namely, the profile as social media memorial, the illness blog as network, the estate as startup, and the smart object as ghost. Each case study provides a window into how commercialism and individualism are the root causes of tech breakdown. Death glitches draw attention not only to technological and social failures but also to hidden, or at least taken-for-granted, relationships. As scholars of queer, feminist, and trans media studies have argued, glitches are telling and productive phenomena; they reveal cyborg entanglements that cannot be perfectly captured or defined.8 Glitches are generally seen as errors in technoculture or as signs that

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something is not working, but according to the writer and curator Legacy Russell, they are also radical forces: each is “a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of non-performance.”9 Death glitches are indicative of a noncommercial surplus contained in the digital format. As digital technologies become integrated into life rituals and mundane habits, they also become parts of death. Platforms at the scale of Facebook or Twitter have through the years, and now decades, changed their policies for handling the data of the dead. For technologists, death is a problem that remains to be solved. Whose data will be retained, and for what purposes? How do engineers make death legible to algorithms that are meant to scale? Algorithms also shape people’s affective experiences of death, sending prompts and triggering responses that feel welcome or creepy, depending on the context.10 Platforms are at the helm of digital legacy. Individuals may view their digital possessions as their creative works or property (you are “your” data), but online accounts are not automatically passed down to surviving loved ones. Meanwhile, data can be more than just the intentional production of content. Many of the digital crumbs following individuals as they go about their lives, cataloged through their smartphones as they browse websites, click on ads, make purchases, or take the subway, are not only part of the surveillance state or ad tech; there is also a sense that these data streams may add up to an approximation of a self.11 After people die, these aggregated traces of everyday digital interactions and transactions can become poignant memorials. Individuals feel attached to their digital items, but the fate of digital accounts is often determined by the arbitrary decisions of a handful of corporate platforms. Since I began this project in 2007, social media platforms have undergone dramatic changes.12 Through my initial research on Facebook memorials, I became interested in the motivation for preserving profiles. I wondered what memorialized profiles would look like over

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time, or if they would even survive the next few years. What started out as a story about one company’s role in memorialization expanded outward as social media platforms grew in scale and scope and became enmeshed with every aspect of contemporary life and death. On platforms and apps, what I refer to as the “communicative traces” of the dead linger on, intermingling with those of the living. Scholars have long used the term “digital remains” to refer to the digital counterparts of physical remains, which include corpses and personal belongings. Throughout this book, I use “digital remains” along with “communicative traces” to refer to more expansive forms of social data. Although communicative traces can become digital remains, I use communicative traces to point to the slippage between living data and the data of the dead.13 Data stick around, embedded in objects on people’s bodies, like Fitbits and other wearable devices, and in smart office and home products like Amazon Echo, Ring, and Google Nest. The data of the dead and the living commingle. Such indecipherability leads to unease, maybe even horror, while stoking fantasies about living on beyond physiological death. How-to articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal blandly instruct users on how to secure their online accounts and pass them on to their next of kin through digital estate– planning startups.14 Episodes of the sci-fi series Black Mirror speculate on what happens to digital accounts after people die, asking whether people can live on through their digital ephemera.15 When it comes to digital death, the reality is often stranger than fiction. Deepfake versions of dead celebrities and political figures can appear “live” at public events, and startups are building programs that turn dead individuals into chatbots, using their stored social media histories to predict and generate new content long into the future.16 What do such life-and-death developments reveal about the contemporary social world? In classic ethnographies, mortuary rites are

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windows into a culture’s soul; death is a fundamentally social activity.17 The cultural historian Thomas Laqueur shows how the bodies of the dead continue to act as “social beings” in the world.18 I present the digital dead as active and, in some cases, interactive agents. Because it is at the center of human experience, caring for the dead reveals embedded values and power structures.19 Death is often discussed in the context of political sovereignty, as in control over mortality, which the political theorist Achille Mbembe famously described as necropolitics.20 Some people are mourned while others are forgotten or ungrievable, often because they were never considered fully human in the first place.21 Likewise, examining digital death care practices can tell us about what and who matters in the social world. Digital death care practices mirror existing structural inequalities; women and other marginalized groups perform unacknowledged if not always invisible maintenance labor, while a few prominent technologists build lasting visible legacies. A few companies based in the United States have power over the lives and deaths of people all over the world. The same entrenched hierarchies related to gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and citizenship that affect the treatment of the dead—who is remembered and how, or where people are buried—are reflected in the care of digital remains. Some are mourned by millions on social media platforms. Others die without fame or recognition, and their families need to raise money for burials through crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like GoFundMe.22 Just as there are unmarked graves on New York’s Hart Island for the most marginalized in society and elaborate monuments to the wealthy and prominent dead, digital legacies do not look the same for everyone.23 Many platforms are designed by and for young and privileged white people in the Global North, so death is not typically a concern, let alone part of a platform’s initial features. For example, Facebook has shifted from being a social networking site for elite college

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students to a common space for mourning and memorialization, but this was an unintended consequence of its expansion and popularity. As a college student, Mark Zuckerberg started FaceMash in 2003 to rank women at Harvard according to their attractiveness. Today, the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative seeks to actively shape humanity’s future, and Zuckerberg has a prominent San Francisco hospital named after him. He is also personally at the center of many debates about disinformation and digital threats to democracy. Just as Zuck has grown up and gained in status and controversy, so have social media. Social media have gone from frivolous to dangerous, and platforms have been fully integrated into the human life cycle.24 Focusing too much attention on individual entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, however, minimizes the collectivist and potentially radical project of maintaining digital possessions for posterity.25 Despite the rising popularity of maintenance as a topic of scholarly inquiry, technologists still tend to disregard the care work that enables the production, circulation, and preservation of digital content. Building on research by science and technology studies (STS) scholars of care and infrastructure, I show how death is a point of breakdown, or a glitch, that renders visible the hidden, sometimes relational, labor behind digital content.26 Death reveals how production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. Relatedly, death calls attention to forms of labor that are typically ignored or devalued, as well as the power that platforms have over people’s lives and deaths. Feminist Marxist scholars expose how capitalist production relies on unpaid or unrecognized labor in order to function.27 Women’s work continues to act as the backbone of the digital economy.28 Behind every carefully curated online presence, someone is performing childcare duties, cooking food, and washing dishes. During the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, essential workers who do

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the work of social reproduction—from nannies and workers in meatprocessing plants to Instacart full-service shoppers and Amazon delivery drivers—have taken on the risk of death. Platform necropolitics means that platform and app algorithms prod delivery workers to work during rainstorms or in other unsafe conditions even as platform owners refuse to designate drivers as real employees. When they die from unsafe working conditions or from Covid-19 complications, their families are left without life insurance payouts or legal recourse. The tech companies that manage workers through algorithms determine what happens to people’s aggregated data and have the potential to affect postmortem legacies as well. Platforms built for real-time tracking and engagement, and devices designed with planned obsolescence, are imperfect vessels for digital immortality. Digital remains are accidentally dependent on the same platform infrastructures that are their very undoing. Memorialization thus marks a departure from the intended uses of social media. In short, death disrupts social media. This is not just a cheeky reference to Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of disruption as a way of remaking and monetizing the mundane through innovation. Rather, I am using death to highlight the discontinuity between technology’s intended functions, or affordances, and its shifting cultural meanings over time. For me, the novelty of digital death has long since passed. My aim here is not to reproduce existing qualitative studies of online mourning practices on social media but rather to understand how platform infrastructures shape emergent death care practices. For decades, researchers have conducted in-depth studies of online mourning rituals and analyzed the relationship between data preservation and mortality.29 Interviews with mourners show how they use social media to retain dynamic relationships with the dead, whether they are distant celebrities or close relatives, just as interviews with hospice patients and cancer bloggers point to how they use online platforms to cope with their own anxieties

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around mortality. While I do hope this book appeals to colleagues in death studies, I am writing with my fellow media studies and communication scholars in mind, especially those of us who research platform labor and the politics of technology. Death, as an analytic, offers a new angle on digital platforms, exposing their connection to deeply entrenched structural inequalities and potentially transformative futures. Techno-solutionism finds its way to the supposed problem of death by applying a myopic quick fix to something inherently messy, giving us a view of solutionism’s larger failures. Some technologists, through belief systems like transhumanism, may even think that technology will allow them to live forever. Through my work I strive to present the failures of death techno-solutionism in an empathetic, if critical, way. After all, death is something that touches everyone, and no one has developed a reliable solution for avoiding mortality, digital or otherwise. Finitude is a blessing, not a curse.30 It is folly to either ignore death or to attempt to solve for it. Mourning Residues

When people die, their digital remains can encompass a wide range of online possessions, along with the devices they are tied to. The most obvious examples are blogs, email accounts, Second Life avatars, and social media profiles. Digital remains can also include domain names, PayPal accounts, Bitcoin wallets, online banking information, and data attached to wearable technology, personal computers, and smartphones. Smart devices may also be part of an individual’s digital remains, along with old hard drives, floppy disks, and broken laptops left behind in drawers. The truth is that data cannot be detached from hardware systems. Digital remains are necessarily tied to physical objects in the world; media archaeology requires the preservation of consoles and disks in addition to software files.31 Digital objects are

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persistent while, at the same time, they erode; or, as the media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun puts it, digital media are contingent on an “enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.”32 In Chun’s estimation, digital information is itself “undead,” having ghostly qualities that she likens to Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism: “if a commodity is, as Marx famously argued, a ‘sensible supersensible thing,’ information would seem to be its complement: a supersensible sensible thing.”33 Digital remains are not ethereal but made of materials that can also suffer breakdown. The attributes that make digital technologies appear ghostly, disembodied, and otherworldly are belied by their material, industrial, and sometimes boring infrastructural qualities.34 Digital remains depend on the global supply chains and human exploitation underlying the success of corporate platforms, including the extraction of minerals necessary for the production of hardware, factories in cities like Shenzhen, and call center workers and content moderators in cities like Manila and Mumbai.35 Digital remains also rely on vast server farms that dot rural landscapes, sapping up endless amounts of energy, and on physical fiber optic cables under the ocean floor.36 Despite the material nature of computer technologies and their practical uses in commerce, offices, schools, and the military, there has long been a sense that they can foster communication with the dead.37 Although Marxist definitions of labor and the valorization of affect are helpful when considering how capitalism extracts profit from digital interactions, data are not just tied to political economic processes but rely on notions of legacy, kinship, posterity, and sentiment.38 “Data” originally referred to things given, perhaps as a gift. Data are more than evidence gathered in the pursuit of objectivity; this is also a way of tracing things that once existed and tracking exchanges. Marcel Mauss’s classic anthropological work The Gift provides insight into noncapitalist forms of reciprocity.39 Gifts always

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seem to contain a trace of the original giver, compelling the recipient to give a gift of equal value. Through these structures of obligation, social groups are bound together. More recently, feminist anthropologists have examined gift economies in relation to both capitalism and social reproduction.40 The status quo can be reproduced by giftgiving, especially when it comes to a gendered division of labor. Objects that are marked as heirlooms, that is, objects that are taken out of circulation and passed across generations, are a means of preserving the past and connecting it to the future, even though all objects, both digital and tangible, are to some degree ephemeral. An asset is generally defined as having monetary worth, a future exchange value or fungibility. Heirlooms, however, are defined by their relationships to the past or to a kind of authentic aura or patina, visible markers of aging, linking the living with the dead.41 Heirlooms are singular, one-of-a-kind objects, whereas digital heirlooms consist of data and metadata and are reproducible, transient, and highly changeable. Digital objects do not exactly have a patina, although they might look outmoded, and they are in some ways more fragile than other kinds of heirlooms. Even so, digital objects carry their own weightiness. Through the process of digital estate planning, by capturing and claiming digital assets as things that are worthy of preservation based on their future value, the aggregated communicative traces of the dead can become potential transgenerational heirlooms. For them to be actualized as heirlooms, however, their recipients must view communicative traces as worthwhile. Nondigital and digital heirlooms both rely on speculative value, and for them to survive, later generations must continue to recognize the importance of these heirlooms and maintain their legacies through storytelling and caregiving. Digital inheritance is also complicated, legally and socially speaking, and following feminist theorists like Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern, throughout this book I use “kin” in a broad sense,

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going beyond blood relatives to include chosen family and other complex social networks. Mourning is always mediated in some way. Other kinds of what the communication scholar Lee Humphreys calls “media traces” have also historically been used to mourn and remember the dead.42 Roland Barthes not only theorized the haunted status of the photograph but left behind an entire mourning diary capturing his responses to his mother’s death over time.43 For Victorians, the visual performance of mourning was paramount, expressed through postmortem, mourning, and spirit photography meant to capture continuing bonds after physiological death. The materiality of Victorian-era mourning went so far as to conjoin the deceased and the mourner with jewelry and wreaths made from the hair of the dead.44 Digital media objects can also be rematerialized, such as when people print out digital photos and paste them in scrapbooks. With smartphones and social media accounts, we can carry photos and other remembrances of the dead at all times, flipping through them along with new content of the living. We can check voicemail messages and texts from the dead, never deleting them, keeping them even after phones cease to function. Material objects associated with a living person, like a grandmother’s favorite wooden kitchen spoon, can become memento mori after their death. Such objects move from being utilitarian to otherworldly.45 This transcendent quality is also key to digital mourning and memorialization as communicative traces, encompassing realtime profiles or constellations of living data, become memorials after a person dies. Mourning objects may lose their power over time, as stories and affective connections to them are lost or fade from memory. Many observations about the social lives and deaths of mourning objects are also applicable to digital remains. Digital remains are older than contemporary social media companies and existed in pre–World Wide Web electronic communities and

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message boards. In a special issue of Women and Performance in 1996, Mia Lipner’s audio art piece Requiem Digitatem captured the experience of losing Michael Current, her online-only friend from the Future Culture mailing list.46 After learning of Current’s death, Lipner experienced grief, including real tears.47 The hyperlinks in the Women and Performance issue are now dead, but the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provides a glimpse of Michael Current’s Future Culture memorial, which displays a grainy black-and-white photograph intended for those who had never met him in meatspace, along with some personal remembrances from mailing-list members.48 The Internet Archive, by preserving lost moments in internet history, has become the keeper of the digital dead, whether they died in the 1990s or in 2019. The death of a friend, even someone we have never met in real life, is a loss nonetheless. Lipner emphasized the “intense personal interactions” in online spaces rather than amplifying the media hype over cybersex (a big deal in 1996) or the hipper, sleeker parts of new technology. As a blind person, Lipner heard the internet rather than seeing it, so her performance through a speech synthesizer reciting online text was distributed to Women and Performance subscribers on cassette. Lipner relied on a wide variety of technologies and hardware to facilitate her experience of the internet; people do not leave embodiment and difference behind when they go online. Embodiment is critical to analyses of digital remains, which are connected to living cultures as well as to burial rites. Data of both the living and the dead are inextricably bound to bodies.49 Technologies are always embodied, and death care practices can provide a grounded way of understanding how even the driest actuarial data are composed of being and beings. Twentieth-century insurance agents traveled to cemeteries to viscerally understand mortality rates, just as Franz Boas and other early ethnographers desecrated Indigenous remains, using the dead as data.50 Digital remains,

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like flesh and bone, are also subject to their own kind of decay and possible desecration. Communicative Traces

This book considers a core contradiction between the immediate utilitarian purposes of personal data and the lasting affective significance of aggregated data. Profiles designed and used for amusement and advertising purposes have the capacity to become sacred spaces for collective mourning and individual legacies. The political theorist Jodi Dean uses the term “communicative capitalism” to describe how late capitalism extracts value by mining communication, just as Fordist capitalism exploited workers in factories and other workplaces.51 I use the term “communicative traces” as a play on Dean’s concept by bridging critiques of digital labor and platform capitalism with theories of materiality, memory, and mourning. Data trails can serve an esoteric purpose, allowing dead users to survive through speculative archives. Communicative traces reconcile narratives about the rise of post-Fordist platform capitalism—including its infrastructural capacities, dependence on continuous engagement, and users’ immaterial “free” labor—with the metaphysical, sacred dimensions of digital objects associated with the dead.52 If, as Marx put it, capital is dead labor, then what is undead information?53 It is possible to extract further value from labor that is itself already expired. All around us, dead users perform postmortem work. Communicative traces point to the networked nature of data production, which includes ambient metadata in addition to intentionally made profiles or other content. Communicative traces merge recent discourses on networked publics and mediated affective labor with anthropological theories of inheritance and exchange. With the rise of wearable devices, the Internet of Things, and the integration of smart objects with digital 15

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platforms, personal data maps onto embodied life by likening people’s digital remains to their physical ones. Both digital and physical remains reveal the traces of people and relationships that once were. Communicative traces reflect the financial and affective value of data but also their social value. Data contain speculative financial and affective value. Additionally, data cannot be separated from social values about reproduction: What can data do for us, or our kin, collectively? What stories can data tell about me, my ancestors, and my descendants? How can data help others better remember me after I am gone? Digital preservation practices like the memorialization of a profile or account or, less commonly, the creation of a posthumous chatbot that imitates the communication patterns of a dead person, speak to a desire to concretize an individual’s aggregated data as a personal archive. A personal archive is intended to be a symbolic representation of a person and their entire personality, maybe capturing a part of the person’s essence. Media theorists have used various terms, such as data flakes, data double, or the algorithmic self, to describe this association of data with their subjective experience.54 Datafied subjectivity relates to a broader argument about data as a form of capture. Digital forms of surveillance relate to histories of chattel slavery, colonialism, and early techniques of policing and governmentality.55 Yet data are not reducible to their uses in structures of oppression: data are also metaphysical, relational objects.56 Data contain an existential quality, what the media theorist Amanda Lagerkvist calls “digital thrownness,” or gesture toward the mythological and the sublime.57 The metaphysical, speculative qualities of data imaginaries are essential to understanding how data-as-representation and dataas-infrastructure (supply chains, logistics, platformization) do not quite add up to an afterlife, even if there is a feeling or hope that they might.58

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Data are ghostly, but the platforms and the data attached to them yield material effects.59 “The network society” refers to the sweeping impacts of information technology, which connects people and institutions from around the globe, altering power structures and cultural flows.60 Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media behemoths—largely based in the greater San Francisco Bay area—are part of a period in technoculture often referred to as Web 2.0, to distinguish these new corporate models from the supposedly static HTML-driven web before the twenty-first century.61 Popularized by the tech marketer and publisher Tim O’Reilly in 2004, the term “Web 2.0” emphasizes user-generated content, collaboration, and interaction on a dynamic web, made manifest in entities like Wikipedia, the perennial favorite example of crowdsourced knowledge production. Web 2.0 logics influenced the rise of platform capitalism and immaterial labor while influencing new modes of social organizing, perhaps even catalyzing revolutionary movements. At least that is one popular narrative.62 Some theorists associated the burgeoning social web with the productive power of networks and what they might build. In theory, networked technologies mediate shared experiences and democratic forms of communication and ritualized exchange.63 Critics, however, picked up on not only the political or economic ramifications of the network society but its effects on personal relationships. New kinds of social participation and technological affordances created the impetus for “affective networks” or “affective publics,” particularly as the personal became public through the production of massive and immediately available audiences. 64 Feminist theories of networked communication emphasize collectivity and social reproduction, not just innovation and solo authorship. Death exposes the political stakes of such networks. Beyond content production and innovation, mortality shines a spotlight on the

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other devalued work that makes digital production possible in the first place. Modes of caring for digital remains that privilege individual content creators too often ignore the collective labor that goes into making and preserving so-called personal data. Data are always relationally made and maintained. Does a profile or blog belong to its author and that person’s next of kin, determined through bloodlines and laws of inheritance, or does it belong to an entire network?65 My focus on communicative traces takes into account the physicality of digital media and their relationship to the work of mourning. Rather than the treatment of the corpse itself, I analyze new care rituals forming around embodied personal data as objects in the world. Caring for a dead body and material possessions often intersects with caring for digital remains; mourners may sift through and pack away physical photographs, clothes, and records while also sorting out plans for devices and old files. Tracking down all of a dead person’s account information is an arduous task, especially in a period of acute grief. Globally dispersed content moderators and IT professionals are part of the network of laborers who keep the digital dead alive, just as much as surviving kin or friends who faithfully maintain the pages of their dead, paying for domain names or removing spam messages as needed. Platform Temporality

Along with materiality, temporality is also central to this book. Silicon Valley refers not only to a physical geographical location in Santa Clara County, California, where many major tech companies are headquartered, but also to an ideological space that has global ramifications and interdependencies.66 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron refer to the power of the “Californian Ideology,” or the region’s blend of neoliberal self-reliance and techno-utopianism.67 Informal networks and burgeoning wealth spurred the creation of venture cap18

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ital firms in the 1960s and 1970s.68 Silicon Valley is a place of deep inequalities, not only inside the heart of tech campuses—where food service workers sleep in vans because they cannot afford the rent while billionaires speed by in their Teslas—but also in terms of the financial structures of businesses and the values embedded in the technologies such companies peddle. Silicon Valley tech companies may talk about the future, but their bottom line is tied to short-term returns on a quarterly basis. The dotcom boom era of the 1990s, and its eventual, spectacular bust, arose from a culture that rewarded risky endeavors.69 Silicon Valley is also open to failure, often encouraging it as a badge of honor in a system that privileges hubris and risk-taking more than dependability. Fail fast, fail often; move fast and break things: these are the mantras of the tech world.70 In the context of long-term digital preservation and postmortem legacies, this makes for a strange backdrop. Silicon Valley is on an ongoing quest for techno-solutions to death, both on a physiological level and in terms of the problems associated with digital inheritance. Many digital immortality startups are vaporware, or novelties that are more theoretical than utilitarian. But such whimsies are made material through the capital backing them and the valuable data provided by subscribers. Technological systems designed by and for their assumed white cisgender male users make similar omissions when it comes to death. As many critical technology scholars have argued, the oversights of major tech companies and small startups can cause harm to marginalized people while furthering racist, sexist, and xenophobic ideologies through their technologies and corporate practices.71 From the standard test image of Lena, a real Playboy centerfold from 1972 used as a proxy, to facial analysis algorithms’ inability to identify women with darker skin tones, white male design decisions have far-reaching implications.72 Large tech companies have repeatedly made unpopular

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decisions regarding inactive accounts, forgetting that people have affective relationships with the profiles of dead loved ones. Platforms’ policies regarding inactive accounts and digital estate–planning startups treat digital belongings as one person’s content, ignoring the networked production of communicative traces and the significance of digital remains to multiple groups of people. No amount of planning and self-optimization can guarantee a smooth continuation of profiles or smart home settings after someone dies. What happens when the sterile world of Silicon Valley information technology encounters the messiness of death? Startup culture and venture capital do not readily accommodate the time span of forever. By going beyond individual human life spans as a way of measuring time, I juxtapose individual mortality with the ephemerality of platforms and devices. I use “platform temporality” as a shorthand for this concept. The utopian promise of digital immortality offered by the web is undermined by commercial dependencies and short technological life spans. The transformation of social data from real-time accounting to sacred legacy-making shows how expectations around what digital media can and should do have dramatically shifted. Platform temporality derives from critical scholarship, particularly Marxist media theory, connected to the rise of platforms.73 Platforms’ quest for growth, for finding new users, means they have a knack for finding new and ingenious ways of extracting value from life. Platform temporality also encompasses recent arguments about temporality and technology, borrowing from other cultural studies of time and power.74 The relationship between technology and time standardization is a central concern in media and communication studies, and navigating mortality is also about managing time.75 Accelerationism is associated with the rapid technological developments hoped for by some transhumanists, who await the Singularity, or the moment when superintelligent AI will self-replicate and

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evolve on an ever increasing timescale, leading to humanity’s end in a kind of secular digital rapture. In more leftist utopian circles, there are hopes that technology will eventually free people from the drudgery of wage labor. If technology would just change fast enough, their theory speculates, we might turn away from work and instead focus on more creative pursuits. There is an obvious incommensurability between companies that promise to organize your digital belongings for eternity and Silicon Valley’s pacing. Contemporary technoculture conjures the pristine whiteness of the Apple store and monochromatic wardrobes. For Silicon Valley startup culture, dealing with death raises some concerns about future projections and risk. Instead of trusting religious entities with their immortal souls, users should put their faith in the tech industry. Rather than employing established institutions or kinship networks to manage digital belongings, ordinary users are expected to outsource that labor to a host of relatively new web-based companies that might very well dissolve within a decade. This book does engage with transhumanists and other futurists who are invested in extending life spans through technology, although I spend more time addressing how people live on through everyday digital objects. Those with power and wealth can establish not just digital legacies but physical monuments like the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock, funded by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, while most people depend on corporate platforms to preserve their own legacies or those of their loved ones. Everyone dies and everyone mourns, but death is far from being the great equalizer. Instead, death sheds light on existing inequalities. In the case of digital death, mourning and memorialization practices make it clear just how much power major tech companies have over people’s lives and afterlives. Transhumanism encompasses a diverse set of beliefs about radically expanding the human life span and potentially achieving

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immortality or posthuman status through technology. There is historical and contemporary synergy between powerful Silicon Valley interests and transhumanist belief systems, as many noted futurists hold prestigious positions in the tech industry. For many futurists, science fiction offers a road map to how technologies could and should be realized. Ray Kurzweil, the famous transhumanist who is currently a director of engineering at Google (a figurehead position but revealing of Google’s values, nonetheless), believes that AI has the ability to solve all of the earth’s problems, including climate change. The temporal patterns of the Singularity thus coincide with Silicon Valley’s race for the new—that is, the planned obsolescence of products, perpetual updates and upgrades of software packages, or the fetishization of newness. As I learned by attending the 2012 Singularity Summit in San Francisco, some transhumanists argue that physiological death itself is a disease that can and should be cured. For some futurists, transhumanism is a form of spiritual practice or an entire cosmology.76 Their belief in data exceeds their pragmatism, and they believe that when used correctly, data can enable humans to live forever. Some elite techies really do think they can escape their earthly fate by uploading their minds to become parts of the cosmos or remaining young and virile for centuries through cryonics or biohacking. The fantasy of disembodied information offers freedom from the limits of fleshly existence. Just like billionaires who plan on fleeing to bunkers or Mars to escape catastrophe here on earth, those who believe in digital immortality also form an exclusive club. Wealthy technologists plan to live forever at the expense of ordinary users, who may achieve immortality only through their measly data. The truth is that no matter how far-fetched technologies like mind-uploading or chatbot replicas may seem, they are already starting to affect how people interact with the dead and conceive of their own posthumous legacies. A Facebook memorial, a preserved cancer

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blog, a digital estate plan, or an inherited smart home: such items are hardly the same as uploading one’s consciousness, but they do serve as conduits between the living and the dead. Data provide a platform for sacred communion. For the majority of people who cannot afford top-shelf life extension treatments and elixirs—such as Peter Thiel’s reported interest in parabiosis, in this case consuming the blood of the young to remain youthful himself—digital immortality might be the only available route to living forever.77 There is a chasm between people who can afford actual life extension technologies (in the United States, this includes things like basic healthcare) and those who can train free chatbots to act in their stead. Breakdown as Method

Because of the pernicious problem of platform temporality, many of the websites and links that form the body of my research have now vanished, with my screenshots and pulled quotations acting as their only physical records apart from scattered captures from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. What started out as a timely project based in fieldwork and web ethnography has become a cultural history of digital remains. Ambiguity between ethnographic and historical practice occurs when nonhuman actors disappear as well as when human interlocutors die. Furthermore, the dynamic qualities of digital remains necessitate treating social media spaces as active subjects, not just as historical records. Human death is not a proper metric for setting boundaries between historical and ethnographic research methods. In 2010, the media theorist Geert Lovink wrote about the cooption of real time. Rather than an archive, social media temporality is a flow or a river, and yet individual moments are lost in the stream. Lovink asked, “Who responds to yesterday’s references? History is something to get rid of.”78 His words seem all the more relevant now. 23

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In hindsight, my research now captures a moment in web history that has since passed me by. Although digital field sites—including platforms, algorithms, and their associated digital cultures—might move fast, sound scholarship is notoriously slow. The process from proposal to grant application to research funding to field study to write-up can take years, if not decades. Digital death is an underlying condition of digital legacy. This is especially apparent with the rise and fall of digital estate–planning companies. What seemed to be a promising enterprise in 2008 is mostly a dead-end today. Over the course of my research, most of the startup founders I interviewed left the business, and nearly all digital estate–planning companies I researched have folded. Today, a younger generation of founders is hoping to disrupt digital death, often targeting millennials and younger generations with their products. When a company goes belly-up, there is always another digital death startup waiting in the wings. Other companies promise to upload people’s personalities into new computer simulations, letting mourners communicate with dead loved ones through chatbots or other avatars. But digital estate planning and immortality bots do not address the overarching problem of platform ephemerality. Additionally, many of the platforms that were important sites for digital memorialization in 2007 and 2008 are now defunct or have radically changed. MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, and other lesser-known platforms are no longer central hubs, even if they once held sacred memorials to the dead. My personal web archive from years of online fieldwork showcases the changing visual culture and presentation of digital remains, pointing to the problem of platform ephemerality. Death Glitch relies on a rich archive of moments in web history, including screenshots of digital estate–planning companies at different moments in time and examples of social media memorials. Although screenshots are not

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enough to capture entire lived network cultures, they do provide snapshots of the visual web from various points in time. Just as digital remains themselves are not based solely in the ether, my research methods include visits to places in the world and face-toface interactions with people in a number of settings. Rather than viewing this strictly as a web ethnography, I instead refer to this project as a form of “network anthropology.”79 I view the digital afterlife as an ecology of interactions, belief systems, and structures of obligation. Digital afterlives are not sequestered on websites but have traction in everyday embodied life. I cannot always directly observe the imagined interactions that people have with the dead through digital platforms, but I can learn more about their imagined interactions through the interview process and through multimedia textual analysis. To help contextualize my archival and web-based findings, I interviewed a wide range of people. I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with the founders of digital estate–planning websites to understand their reasons for initiating such ventures and to get a sense of their desires and fears or successes and failures. I also interviewed people who are charged with the long-term care of digital remains to find out how these networked relationships fared over time and to assess their emotional effects. What does it feel like to maintain a dead loved one’s cancer blog, even years after the person’s death? I spoke with transhumanists who are optimistic about the future of technology or view it as an extension of their religious beliefs. Ethnographic research tells us what lived experiences of digital remains are like. This is a global phenomenon, so many of my interviews took place over Skype, with interlocutors in Hong Kong, Boston, London, Texas, and rural Vermont. In addition, I talked to people in cafés in Los Angeles, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, and Seattle. I also traveled to key locations to engage in participant observation. Unsurprisingly, given San Francisco’s status as a tech hub, my research

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has taken me all over the city to sites like the Internet Archive and the Long Now Foundation’s Interval Space and events like Wired magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary festival, the 2012 Singularity Summit— an annual transhumanist conference—and the 2013 Death Salon. I traveled to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and visited Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives. I also traveled to Los Angeles to meet with members of the Order of the Good Death and conveners of the Death Salon. I interviewed Mormon transhumanists in Provo, Utah, visiting the Transhuman House there. Digital remains are dependent on the global reach and future existence of successful platforms, but they are also mostly located in the United States, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area and along the West Coast. This book is not especially focused on mortuary rituals or treatment of corpses themselves, but I have also conducted research on the death positivity movement, green and DIY burial practices, and how new technologies are integrated with funerary rites. This ancillary research has served as background to my investigation of digital legacies and how digital platforms intersect with the materiality of mourning. I also traveled to transhumanist centers to learn more about thwarting death through technology, which is in stark contrast with death positivity. A Network of Glitches

This book explores how death—including human mortality, social breakdown, and technological decay—disrupts technologists’ bestlaid plans. Each chapter uses historical, theoretical, and ethnographic findings to show how the commercial platform infrastructures of communicative traces undermine their long-term viability as transcendent or sacred objects. In chapter 1, I show how communicative traces become objects worthy of preservation and how death reveals the affective value of social 26

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media profiles. For Facebook and other social media platforms, death presented a design problem. For users, social media profiles became sacred spaces for mass mourning and memorialization. Although platforms may eventually recognize and try to harness the value that can be extracted by accommodating users’ needs around death, they can never adequately resolve the disconnect between commercial interests and social needs. Platforms botch their dealings with dead users and mourners precisely because they are driven by commercial interests over social or cultural ones. Through a discourse analysis of media coverage and interviews with former Virginia Tech students and Facebook employees, I trace the origin of Facebook’s memorialization policy shift regarding the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 to show how both the platform’s interests and mourners’ actions shaped the company’s response. Chapter 2 takes up the implications for long-term memorialization, connecting online memorials to embodied labor. Illness blogs present spaces that show how networks of invisible labor change over time, as many actors contribute to maintaining digital remains as active sites of social reproduction. Tech affordances or limitations present extra obstacles for those who are supporting illness blogs, especially after a blogger’s death. Although authorial voices are often presented as individual content creators, illness blogs are inherently networked. I examine early pre-web instances of illness documentation on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL), drawing a line between such examples and my ethnographic findings from interviewing mourners about the infrastructures available to maintain the illness blogs of the dead. Drawing on feminist STS and disabilities studies scholarship, I show how physical caregiving and digital care work intersect in the production and preservation of illness blogs. After a blogger dies, those nonhuman and human networks, along with the power structures inherent to digital spaces, become all the more visible.

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In chapter 3 I argue that digital estate planning is one attempt to solve the problem of user death, which began as both individuals and platforms realized that caring for digital remains was important. Death is a lucrative business, demonstrated by the long histories of the life insurance, estate-planning, and funeral industries, and digital death entrepreneurs sought a piece of the pie. Through their narrow and often privileged positions, death entrepreneurs attempt to solve the problem of death by founding startup companies, which are not built to last. Rather than ignoring human death, digital estate– planning startups highlight a fundamental flaw with technologists’ attempts to intervene in long-term futures. Startup companies may die long before digital assets can be passed from one generation to the next. Along with a historical overview of the data practices of the life insurance industry, in this chapter I draw on interviews with startup founders and other death entrepreneurs who are imagining how accumulated data may become transgenerational objects. Chapter 4 considers the legacies of smart objects in the physical world, asking what it means for a far-away descendant to inherit a smart home or a monument. I argue that technologists’ plans for posterity are often at odds with the infrastructures, energy, and labor required to maintain these objects over time. Death often marks a point of breakdown, particularly when smart objects become difficult to manage for those who inherit them. Smart homes are designed according to the specifications of those who build them and do not take into account the desires of those who inherit them. They are fundamentally incompatible with the collective care work needed to keep them running. Still, technologists may harbor dreams of hacking or tinkering with mortality. Rather than viewing technology through short-term gains, technologists are beginning to craft long-term visions of the future. As I show through my analysis of several field sites centered around the material aspects of digital posterity, even the

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most secular of techno-cultures contain aspects of the transcendent or sublime. In the book’s conclusion, I point to possible new territories for digital remains, highlighting how tech entrepreneurs have the capacity to engineer the future according to their own personal utopian visions. Mortality is not just a human problem. Objects, networked systems, platforms: they all break down and die. Death Glitch explores the disconnect between the dreams and visions associated with data versus the work and infrastructures required to realize them. I also offer a brief discussion of the effects of mass death on both structural inequalities and death care practices. I researched and wrote the majority of this book before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted life and death around the world. Platforms are now even more fundamental to death care practices, from hospice to burial and memorialization. People create robust worlds on social media, but those social networks are precarious. Platform temporality will make it difficult for such digital memorials to withstand the test of time; it also heightens on-the-ground experiences of exploitation and inequality. Digital remains are laden with assumptions about who the user is, even the dead user. Death glitches reveal power imbalances between corporate platforms and users or inheritors of those systems.

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1 Social Memorials

Death is a problem that keeps haunting social media platforms. In a statement in late 2019, Twitter said the company would delete inactive profiles. From Twitter’s perspective, removing inactive users would encourage more engagement while also protecting against bots, impersonators, or other shadow accounts. In theory, it would make Twitter more trustworthy while freeing up underutilized handles.1 To Twitter’s surprise, many people responded in anger: the company had forgotten about dead users. Craig Jenkins, a music critic for New York Magazine, tweeted, “Please do not scrub the dead homies’ accounts.” Twitter representatives backtracked and apologized, saying they would delete inactive accounts only after they had found a way to properly memorialize the accounts of the dead.2 Twitter is a platform intended for pithy, immediate responses to current events or quick-paced meta commentary. Caught up in a flow of witty retorts and one-liners attached to GIFs, singular tweets lose their meaning when separated from the particular moment in which they were created. Archived tweets can become indecipherable out of context. Twitter’s developers did not originally envision the platform as a personal or historical archive. However, over time, users, along with institutions like the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress, have recognized the importance of securing tweets for individual and collective posterity. Since 2006, the dead have accumulated on Twitter. Ephemeral, real-time communications can become make-

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shift memorials with emotional significance. Despite high-profile cases of dead celebrities or public figures tweeting from beyond the grave, Twitter still did not have a comprehensive memorialization policy in 2020. Twitter is not alone: LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms have perfunctory memorialization policies, typically deactivating a dead account after close family members present a death certificate as proof. On many platforms, it is difficult for both users and algorithms to distinguish the living from the dead. Corporate platforms and their users have historically been at odds when it comes to how they handle the deaths of individuals. Platforms see communicative traces as sources of commercial value, whereas users derive affective value from them. These differing metrics of value lead to conflicts between how users want to interact with the profiles of the dead and how platforms want to deal with them, or even how platforms imagine what their users want. Users have shaped how platforms honor and remember the dead, and users regularly push back against careless or harmful policies regarding inactive or dead accounts. Here I trace the cultural history of the social media memorial, analyzing Facebook’s memorialization policy decisions as the company grappled with its rapidly changing scale and deepening social applications. The trajectory of Facebook, one of the oldest, largest, and most widely used platforms still in existence, offers a unique window into the tensions between users and designers and between the commercial and affective dimensions of communicative traces. Facebook continuously mishandles dead users precisely because it is fundamentally driven by commercial interests over social or cultural ones. On April 16, 2007, a gunman opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing thirty-two people before turning the gun on himself. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting event in U.S. history. The Virginia Tech massacre thrust social media platforms—especially

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Facebook—into the spotlight, prompting a new set of cultural norms around digital death. Facebook became a source of informationgathering in the immediate aftermath of the shootings and then later became a space for memorialization. Virginia Tech students and other mourners around the world created Facebook groups to memorialize the dead, and victims’ profiles became sacred shrines. The Virginia Tech massacre reflects the moment when Facebook memorials became part of the North American mainstream; death and social media converged on a national scale. This case study provides a situated way of understanding how death glitches take platforms by surprise and why technological solutions are incommensurable with the sacred rituals attached to communicative traces. Platforms try to keep up with users’ adaptations, attempting to find technological fixes to the new complications raised by the deaths of users. Although platforms may eventually recognize and try to harness the value that can be extracted by accommodating users’ wishes around death, they can never fully resolve the disconnect between commercial interests and social needs. Social media memorials are located both within and outside of time. They are driven by attention economy metrics, but they also have the potential to remake platform temporality.3 New Media, New Rituals

One spring morning in 2005, an email alerted everyone on the campus of my small liberal arts college to the sudden death of a first-year student. Sitting in my dorm room, I logged in to Facebook on my desktop computer. My heart sank when I located the dead student’s profile. In his profile photo, he was holding a joint, gray smoke obscuring part of his face. I wondered if his family would want the image taken down, his youthful indiscretion accidentally captured as a

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legacy. I imagined the awkwardness of my own family sifting through my digital belongings after my death. This was my first encounter with Facebook memorialization. The unplanned relationship between one student’s social media presence and his death struck me as representative of a fundamental disconnect between how people were meant to use Facebook and its eventual cultural significance. This college student used Facebook to communicate with his friends, presenting a fun-loving side of himself. In an instant, his profile became a memorial and a record of his short life. I wanted to understand this transformation or how a platform designed and built for immediate amusement—or “social networking,” its most exalted goal—became a hallowed space. In 2005, many of the features we now associate with Facebook did not exist. For one, Facebook was a website accessed through web browsers on laptop or desktop computers; it did not launch its first mobile app until 2007. The company introduced the News Feed in 2006 and added the infamous thumbs-up emoji indicating “like” in 2009 (today, a monumental replica stands outside Facebook’s headquarters on Hacker Way in Menlo Park). Yet from its earliest days, Facebook was an online space for people to congregate and remember the dead. For Facebook, the company’s shift to informal mourning platform was an uncomfortable development. Technologists did not design social media platforms with death in mind, particularly because they were created by and for young people. No one had intended a social networking site for elite college students to become a place for mass mourning and long-term memory storage. For as long as the internet has been around, users have found ways to memorialize the dead. But as social media platforms grew in scale, online memorials became more commonplace or even expected parts of mourning. Mourning rituals began to intersect with

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expanding social media platforms, and users created new, ad hoc ways of remembering the dead before formal memorialization policies existed. New mourning practices emerged in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which also coincided with the rising power of social media platforms like Facebook. Communities, large or small, electronic or otherwise, have their own ways of remembering the dead. Although most Americans did not use early internet forums like the WELL or Usenet, collective mourning in digital spaces slowly became more mainstream. In 1995, the first documented virtual cemeteries appeared online, where mourners could leave tokens like candles, flowers, and other gifts for the deceased. Virtual cemeteries could be accessed from anywhere at any time, unlike physical graves. Some comments on virtual graves were addressed directly to the dead, and a number of memorials were created years or even decades after a person’s death. Such early examples of virtual cemeteries prefigured contemporary social media memorials, facilitating informal, more decentralized mourning practices. Early studies of social media memorials reported many of the same features found in virtual cemeteries. On Facebook and MySpace, disparate groups that might be left out of funeral services or official obituaries were able to actively participate and maintain dynamic relationships with the dead.4 Unlike dedicated memorials in virtual cemeteries, designed to mourn death from the start, social media sites were repurposed as sites for mourning. One unintended consequence of more publicly accessible online memorials was the capacity for intrusion and conflict, including by spam and other unwanted interlopers. Grief tourists and trolls are invigorated by social media platforms, which actively encourage engagement and participation through comments sections, quantifiable like and share buttons, and other features.5 Memorials have the capacity to go viral. Because of their vast reach, Facebook memorial pages gave rise to a new form of what the communication scholar Whitney Phil-

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lips calls “RIP trolling,” where strangers post offensive comments or images on Facebook memorials, especially after high-profile murders.6 Fledgling social networking websites were not equipped to handle such practices. Whereas volunteer moderators took on these roles in small virtual communities by mediating flame wars and quelling harassment campaigns as needed, on social networking sites with large numbers of users, such moderation techniques were insufficient.7 Relying on social media platforms to broker long-term legacies created a host of problems, both for users and for designers. The original intentions behind technological innovations erode as new practices and rituals are born. Technologies that were first used by a small number of early adopters and institutions expanded, and networked communication became more commonplace. Users, especially youthful ones, take and adapt new technologies—from fax machines to SMS messages on mobile phones—for their own purposes, sometimes taking them out of the office and into activist causes.8 Facebook was intended for young people as a recreational social tool but quickly took on other uses and meanings. At the time of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, Facebook’s purpose and scale were in flux. During the shootings and in their immediate aftermath, memorialization that started as a local outpouring in Virginia Tech social circles extended outward as news of the massacre traveled outside the university’s campus. Facebook, a social network primarily used by college students, became part of the news media’s narrative around the shootings and took center stage in mourning rituals, both locally and globally. Such developments were, in part, a result of the rapid growth and expansion of Facebook as a platform. In 2004, thefacebook.com opened to Harvard undergraduates before the site expanded to other elite institutions and finally became available to all universities and colleges. In 2005, Facebook spread to high school students and to

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some companies, and in 2006 it opened to the general public, causing some users to worry about the social networking site’s efficacy as the website lost its clear association with universities.9 A spokesperson for Facebook at the time, Chris Hughes, interviewed in the New Yorker in 2006, said: “If you don’t have a Facebook profile, you don’t have an online identity. . . . It doesn’t mean that you are antisocial, or you are a bad person, but where are the traces of your existence in this college community? You don’t exist—online, at least.”10 Facebook became a status symbol and a marker of identity. In 2007, Facebook overtook MySpace as the number-one social networking website for college students. According to one study, 92 percent of college students had Facebook accounts that year. In 2007, Facebook also officially became a platform, giving third-party developers access to the company’s API (application programming interface).11 Facebook’s memorialization and the rise of the social media memorial can be mapped onto this shift; 2007 was also the year the Virginia Tech mass shooting prompted Facebook to revise its policy for dead users.12 The massacre revealed how central to campus life Facebook had become. It proved to be a vital tool during the shootings and their aftermath: students formed Facebook groups to verify the safety of Virginia Tech students and communicate with each other when cell phone towers and the university email system both failed. In that moment, Facebook was a lifeline. Later, Virginia Tech students mourned their friends, dormmates, and classmates by commenting on the Facebook walls of shooting victims. The platform also provided an outlet for more public kinds of grief. Facebook groups offered people across the country and around the world, even those with no direct relationship to Virginia Tech, a way to publicly share their sentiments. Right away, Facebook groups with names like In Memorial [sic]: Virginia Tech became spaces for collective mourning. As early as April 17, 2007, the day after the massacre, there were already 236 Facebook

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Facebook’s landing page from 2004 (Image from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine)

groups related to the killings.13 According to a USA Today article, a “group titled ‘Always remember VIRGINIA TECH’ grew at a pace of 1,800 members in three hours, surpassing 10,347 by midafternoon.”14 A Forbes reporter noted that more than “500 groups sprung up connecting everyone from European students who were ‘Praying for Virginia Tech’ to a tribute page for Muslim students who died in the shooting. Facebook’s largest group had more than 110,000 members by Tuesday morning.”15 Facebook provided the scaffolding for widespread, even global, participation. Student mourners created new rituals using the platform. Facebook users created virtual badges, each with the letters VT and a black ribbon, to commemorate those killed. The badges replaced users’ usual Facebook profile pictures, and users displayed them for months

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after the shooting as a sign of unity with Virginia Tech. Like the physical ribbons that individuals wear for various causes, such as red ribbons for AIDS awareness or pink ones for breast cancer research, these badges expressed solidarity on a mass scale. No matter their location, anyone with a Facebook profile could take up the Virginia Tech mantel, becoming a “Hokie,” the moniker of the Virginia Tech mascot, if only for a short time. Unlike newer Facebook filters for use after natural disasters or other tragic events—such as the tricolor flag profile photos offered after a terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015—the Virginia Tech ribbons were spontaneous DIY features, created and spread by users themselves. Tensions between the public and private facets of social media, along with the sudden change in Facebook’s scale, led to some growing pains. Virginia Tech sparked debates about whether social media profiles were public or private objects. Social media, Facebook in particular, became essential sources for journalists. Instead of interviewing students affected by the shooting, journalists used Facebook posts, along with Virginia Tech message boards and students’ personal blogs, as ready-made sources.16 In the days following the Virginia Tech shootings, CNN used victims’ Facebook profiles to acquire photographs and descriptions of those who were killed. Grabbing details from “About Me” sections of victims’ Facebook profiles, journalists solemnly stated things like “Emily’s favorite color was blue” before national television audiences. The Washington Post gleaned details about the events that transpired inside classrooms by perusing Facebook.17 Of the thirty-two individuals featured in an article accompanying an NPR segment titled “Remembering Virginia Tech’s Shooting Victims,” nineteen profile photographs came from Facebook pages. For journalists, Facebook acted as an authority on the dead. NPR described one of the victims, Ross Alameddine, as an “intelligent, funny, easygoing guy,” but this description was from a memorial page

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on Facebook, not from interviews with the victim’s friends.18 For the younger victims, Facebook provided journalists with easy access to photographs and testimonials, as well as insights into their favorite bands, quotations, and books or other interests. Facebook served many purposes after the shootings. Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker Media empire, highlighted the multipronged importance of Facebook as a platform: “Lest anyone doubt the significance of Facebook, the gruesome massacre at Virginia Tech has provided a reminder. Mark Zuckerberg’s college social network has provided a bulletin board for survivors to reassure friends, a forum for abuse of the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui [sic], and, pictured here, an online memorial wall.”19 Facebook became a networked space for individuals to find common causes, such as favoring stricter gun control laws or coming together to take part in mass mourning rituals. Facebook continued to act as a public memorial space long after the Virginia Tech massacre, a space where many young people were memorialized after their premature deaths. In the days, weeks, and months after the Virginia Tech shootings, Facebook pages became “sacred spaces where friends and family swap favorite memories, linger with photos and post messages to their lost loved one.”20 The Facebook profiles of deceased students preserved “what’s left of their voices,” according to one of their surviving friends.21 The Virginia Tech shootings linked Facebook to mourning in the mainstream media, but friends and family members of the victims viewed Facebook profiles as sacred remains, not just as a way of commemorating a specific tragic event. After the shootings faded from the news cycle, the victims’ profiles remained well-visited shrines for people who knew them. Turning social media platforms into mourning sites exceeds their utilitarian purpose. Deeming who is counted as a legitimate user affects who is remembered online and who is not. Over the past several years, online memorials have become part of larger social

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movements like Black Lives Matter. As the sociologist and STS scholar Ruha Benjamin put it, calling upon the recent dead “is a call for solidarity and an insistence that Black Afterlives Matter. It is part of a broader repertoire of invoking the slain to vivify collective action.”22 Hashtags like #SayHerName became calls for Black women, especially Black trans women, to be counted among the dead and memorialized alongside murdered Black men.23 Online memorials are now intimately connected to hashtag activism, in addition to providing the scaffolding for individual remembrance.24 Grassroots efforts around memorialization can be a form of resistance—such as when hashtags and viral videos increase the visibility of the victims of police shootings—even if memorialization is simultaneously reinscribed by late capitalism’s demands for constant connectivity. In the face of mass death and viral depictions of violence, hashtag-driven celebrations of Black life and joy are also a form of resistance.25 But platforms are not always equipped to handle such practices. Platform temporality points to the discomfort that arises when a platform built for immediate social networking becomes a place to honor the dead for years or even decades. When Facebook went live in 2004, death was not part of twenty-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s plan. Zuckerberg envisioned FaceMash as a “hot or not” platform. During his testimony before Congress related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, Zuckerberg woodenly mentioned Facebook’s dorm-room origin multiple times, blaming his youth for Facebook’s follies.26 Reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin’s unflattering portrayal of Zuckerberg as an immature, hoodie-wearing sociopath in The Social Network, the youth and elitism behind Facebook’s creation are key to understanding the awkwardness of Facebook’s handling of death or other counterpublics that spring from commercial platforms. Facebook was constructed as a utilitarian tool for Ivy League undergraduates. Its founders did not envision death as a central aspect of

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the social networking website and therefore did not anticipate the need for features that would accommodate death and mourning. Despite being designed for college students, who are statistically unlikely to die unless by suicide, accident, or acts of violence, the site became an ad hoc mourning platform. Just as the original Apple Watch failed to include a component for tracking a person’s menstrual cycles, and various other oversights were made in designs imagined and built by straight, white, cisgender men, Facebook’s original intended use reflected its creators’ desires and needs. Young, wealthy white men are not typically accustomed to contemplating their own mortality and are sheltered from such realities, unlike more marginalized young people who may encounter death and violence in their daily lives. No one, however, much less a group of college-aged aspiring entrepreneurs, could have predicted the eventual scale of Facebook’s use or its role in twenty-first-century mourning rituals. Facebook engineers’ distance from death made it a glaring problem. Because of the gap between the expected uses of the platform and cultural mourning practices forming around social media, Facebook originally planned to remove the profiles of all thirty-two Virginia Tech massacre victims. In 2007, most people’s profiles stayed active, even after their deaths. If someone told the company about a user’s death, Facebook would quietly remove the account after a thirty-day grace period. In the case of the Virginia Tech victims, their names were well publicized, and Facebook spokespeople said the company would remove all their profiles. That was simply the company’s protocol. Users’ grassroots actions, however, pushed Facebook to change that policy. Several hundred friends and family members of the Virginia Tech victims campaigned to have their loved ones’ profiles remain “indefinitely as virtual memorials.”27 A Facebook profile represents a person’s social networks, and to delete such a profile was “to break a

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chain of connections,” as a student who survived the shootings put it. Mourners used online protests, as well as more traditional letter-writing campaigns and organized phone calls, to convince Facebook to change its procedure. In response to the outcry after the Virginia Tech shootings, Facebook referred to its new policy, which allowed profiles to persist even after a user’s death, as “memorialization.” If a verified relative of a dead person alerted Facebook and went through the trouble of proving that the person was dead, by providing either a death certificate or an obituary, Facebook displayed the profile in a memorialized state. To become memorialized, an individual’s Facebook page stayed visible, but the company hid some features. Facebook removed contact information, groups, and private details such as the person’s relationship status from the profile. Basic information, along with the person’s educational history, wall, and photographs, remained on the page for existing Facebook friends to view. With the new memorialization policy, Facebook, not a person’s loved ones, ultimately decided what constituted an acceptable memorial page. Some users wanted to preserve Facebook profiles in their entirety, prompting a new wave of grassroots protests. In a Facebook group called Facebook Memorialization Is Misguided: Dead Friends Are Still People, members asked Facebook to make the entire profile of a dead user accessible. Virginia Tech student Juno Woods, whose girlfriend, Maxine Turner, was killed in the 2007 shootings, initially created the group as part of the collective effort to prevent Facebook from deleting the victims’ profiles. After achieving that first goal, the group then asked for more specific changes to the company’s memorialization policy. Mourners wanted to preserve the interests and preferences of their dead loved ones and keep their social relationships intact. At the time, Facebook created rudimentary kinship diagrams, letting users show how they met each other and situating them in

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particular networks based on institutions and locations. Facebook’s memorialization pages, however, erased those social histories. In the Facebook group’s description, Woods wrote: Firstly, their interests, favorite books, favorite movies, favorite television shows, “about me,” and quotes are gone. Secondly, we who were their friends cannot say that we met someone through them. This information is gone. (I, for one, met many people through Maxine before and after she was killed.) Thirdly, their groups are no longer listed. These groups reflect the things in life about which they cared, the things that made them laugh, and the ideas that moved them.28

More than 2,700 members joined the Facebook Memorialization Is Misguided group within the first couple of weeks. Removing personal details upset many Facebook users because they viewed their dead friends’ profiles as living archives of their shared memories. Instead of seeing memorialization as a privacy issue, users considered Facebook memorials to be valuable, even sacred, objects used by a collective. They did not view memorialization as an institutionalized tribute to be imposed from above. From the perspective of mourners, to stay connected to a friend’s Facebook profile was to reach back into the past while cementing a social future. If Facebook controlled access to this history, then the platform in essence owned the online identities of all Facebook users, dead or alive. Ultimately, the retention of Facebook profiles, along with Facebook’s relative longevity as a platform, has had lasting repercussions on mourning practices. Woods has also maintained their personal relationship with Max through Facebook. In an interview I conducted with them a decade later, Woods told me that they still use Max’s Facebook page to communicate with her, visiting the page and viewing their shared photographs. Because of Facebook’s changing 43

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interface, Max’s profile still displays some photographs but not “like” pages or any of the newer features added since 2007. As a result of Facebook’s design updates, all of the Virginia Tech victims’ profile images are now question marks rather than representative photographs. There are clear signs of age and noticeable differences from between these memorial accounts and active Facebook accounts, although there is nothing marking Max’s profile as a memorial. Woods told me that the persistence of her profile has been a source of comfort and stability in their life: “It’s been a rock to me.” However, if Facebook were to alter the page or make it disappear as an entity, or if Max’s family decided to remove her page, Woods could lose that anchor. More than a decade after Max’s death, her online life continues to evolve and even has a political purpose: Woods became a pro–gun control activist. Days after the Isla Vista mass shooting of University of California–Santa Barbara students on May 23, 2014, Woods posted a photo on Twitter as part of the #NotOneMore campaign started by Richard Martinez, the father of one of the Isla Vista victims. The caption below the photo, in which Woods is holding a portrait of Max, reads: “Because the girl I loved was stolen from us at Virginia Tech, I stand with Richard Martinez #NotOneMore.” Digital remains may be powerful entities, persisting long after a person’s physiological death and taking on new dimensions as time passes. Max’s profile is frozen in 2007 time. In the meantime, Woods has subsequently graduated from Virginia Tech, obtained a Ph.D., finished a postdoc, and navigated several career shifts. Their work and activism in queer tech and open-source communities is at odds with Facebook’s values (or lack thereof ), but Max’s digital legacy continues to deepen and to be of significant value to Woods. Her profile image may be static, but her digital afterlife is dynamic and transforming, even as those close to her grow and platforms change. Platform tem-

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porality encompasses these strange intersections of ephemerality and persistence, of real-time interaction and long-term legacy. Working the Dead

Despite the deep personal attachments people have to online profiles, tech platforms do not anticipate death and how it affects users because platforms focus on sources of value in the context of living, breathing users. Death was not baked in to social media platforms like Facebook, but memorialization has become a source of value to Facebook all the same: it helps keep users invested in an imperfect, aging platform. Through the preservation of profiles, the dead are able to remain productive members of a network. The ubiquity of social media platforms, their pervasiveness in people’s daily lives, is directly tied to their incorporation into mourning rituals. From the small virtual communities of the early 1990s web sprang a new kind of connectivity attached to corporate platforms, becoming a reified “social network” that began with sites like LiveJournal (1999), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004). The platformization of the web expanded the reach of social networking sites and helped them infiltrate cultural production, government agencies, and financial structures.29 By the early 2000s the social web seemed to be, at least in theory, a place for “everybody.”30 As more people went online, online death became more visible. Between 2004 and 2010, the height of Web 2.0, millions of people around the world were producing social media profiles and other shareable content as intimate parts of themselves.31 The semi-public or sometimes public nature of social media profiles provides an archive of these momentary interactions, securing a network of relationships over time. Social media interactions reinforce bonds that exist both online and offline, especially when younger generations store all of their photographs and personal communications in digital 45

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form rather than on paper. When people die, these affective archives become all the more precious. The growth of social media platforms during the Web 2.0 era helped spark the idea that anyone can be a producer, putting power in the hands of ordinary individuals and collectives rather than under the control of the state or other official institutions. Web 2.0 platforms turned informal habits and interactions, like gossiping or checking in on someone, into formalized and public events.32 With so many users creating endless streams of content, personal data became more useful to government agencies, corporations, and advertisers. The value inherent to personal data is at the heart of tensions between users and the powerful entities that manage their communicative traces. Because discourses surrounding Web 2.0 focus on active participation and user-generated content, death seems to undermine definitions of productivity on social media. When websites designed for living, youthful individuals instead become platforms for protracted relationships with the dead, definitions of value and production necessarily shift. Dead users, of course, cannot perform the activities that data-mining companies and corporations tend to privilege. The media theorist Tero Karppi argues that for platforms like Facebook, dead users were initially a form of necro-waste, although the platform eventually recognized death as a form of connectivity.33 The informal mourning practices growing around social media profiles were at odds with some of the most vital aspects of social media production, at least from the perspective of technologists. The codification of Facebook memorialization revealed, however, how dead users can still be of value, even if it is based on affective relationships rather than new content production. As Tama Leaver and other media scholars have also observed, mass mourning on social media platforms is still tied to platforms’ commercial interests; it attracts living users and keeps them emotionally in-

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vested in platforms.34 Mourning itself is hard to disentangle from the attention economy. Dead people’s Facebook memorial pages often accrue “likes” and emoji reacts. Garnering a large number of likes and other forms of engagement is a calculus for popularity after death, as well as during life. Algorithms do not readily distinguish between positive and negative attention, although some researchers have attempted to use content to manipulate users’ emotions; a death may get the same amount of engagement as a wedding or birth announcement. On some level, Facebook’s willingness to expand its memorialization policies is a reflection of its desire for growth. Marxist social media critics often relate commercial platforms to new forms of labor, showing how liberatory technologies are in fact tied to inequality and exploitation. Instead of producing goods in the industrial-age Fordist factory, workers engage in immaterial, unpaid labor, allowing themselves to become products of major companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat.35 If the dead begin to outnumber the living on Facebook, retaining the profiles of the dead will create more opportunities for surveillance and extraction. The Virginia Tech shootings helped highlight the affective value of communicative traces for users and mourners as well as for Facebook as a platform. Facebook gained positive recognition for serving students’ communication needs during the tragedy and acting as a sacred space for mourners. For those victims’ family members who were previously unfamiliar with Facebook, media coverage of the massacre and its aftermath may have alerted them to the importance of keeping their loved ones’ profiles alive. According to news reports from the time, some parents joined Facebook to view their children’s profiles, adding to Facebook’s active user base and helping the platform reach an older generation. After Facebook updated its memorialization policy, some parents even had their children’s deactivated pages resurrected.36 Memorialization actually helped the platform grow its user base.

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Facebook spokespeople acknowledged that the Virginia Tech shootings altered the company’s assessment of the profiles of the dead. According to a member of Facebook’s communications team, “Until the Virginia Tech tragedy, we had a very simplistic policy in place. Now when we are notified by a family member or confirmed friend of the victim, we will put the page in a memorialized state indefinitely.”37 The Virginia Tech shootings cemented Facebook’s prominence as a site for mourning. Platforms like Facebook claim to center human connections, but platforms themselves are cultivating and curating these connections through their own designs. Platforms determine how users experience communicative traces over time. As the communication scholar Lee Humphreys describes, although media accounting of the self already existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, social media platforms have more control today over those mediated memories. Snapchat was intentionally designed to be ephemeral, but users pushed the platform to allow them to preserve some snaps as memories.38 On the other hand, users are sometimes distraught when Facebook and other platforms use memory features like “On This Day” to encourage engagement, especially when platforms stir up painful memories. Facebook’s Year in Review feature, for example, reminded a developer about his daughter’s death.39 Users and platforms do not always agree on how platforms should be used or maintained, and death is still a point of contention. In the context of data mining, dead users leave nothing concrete for platforms to track. Facebook, however, recognized that the affective value of dead users is important because the connections that people form and reinforce on the platform do not dissipate when individual subjects die. Posts might take on more affective significance after a person’s death as they move from practical communications to sentimental archives.40 The network itself, along with the affective ties

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that bind it together, persists. Through the practice of memorialization, the dead are brought back into the system and made productive once again. That is why Facebook, eventually, shifted its memorialization policy to preserve the profiles of the dead by default. To memorialize an account, one must produce proof of the death and proof of a relationship to the deceased, whereas to deactivate or delete the account, individuals must provide birth and death certificates, adding an extra layer of difficulty.41 Preserving memorialized profiles allows the dead to contribute as productive members of the networked society, acting as spaces for new kinds of collaboration between the living and the dead. This has become familiar in the context of celebrities, such as Natalie Cole’s duet with her dead father, Nat King Cole, or Tupac Shakur’s posthumous performance at Coachella, but now almost anyone, no matter how insignificant, can continue to take part in affective networks after they die.42 Such posthumous connections are also lucrative for the companies that manage the data of the dead. But even if social media platforms rely on unpaid labor extracted from users, and subject them to surveillance, the relationships between users and the content they produce are complicated. Many individuals have strong affective ties to the digital labor they perform. Online interactions are not less authentic or less real than other forms of communication, even if corporate platforms are shaping these relationships.43 Facebook memorialization is significant because it reveals the collective potential of social media while troubling the central role that corporate platforms play in mediating important life events. The notion of the individual profile belonging solely to its referent also contradicts the kinship logics at play with mourning practices on social media. A profile is not a singular static entity but a dynamic and interactive cluster of social relations. Sometimes different users may contest the treatment of profiles as disparate mourners negotiate

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over how a profile should be memorialized or if it should continue to exist at all.44 Although Facebook’s policies regarding death tend to focus on users as authors of content, protecting individual privacy rights, Facebook profiles are valuable to both the company and to social networks because of their connections with other entities. Corporate platforms privilege speed and immediacy, but they are also invested in aggregating user data over time to tailor ads. To do this effectively, social networking websites rely on servers to collect and store vast amounts of data.45 Individuals’ profiles now follow them through life, sometimes even from conception, documented in ultrasound and pregnancy photos and shared with social networks before they are born. Social media can track individuals, as well as their kin and social networks, throughout their entire life cycles.46 As platforms like Facebook converge with other forms of social media—Instagram, Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, and Pinterest—along with news sources and a vast number of commercial websites and institutions, the amount of data stored about an individual and their networks is immense. The affective value of communicative traces is of central importance, but the data are also extremely valuable to advertisers, companies, and government agencies long after a person dies, providing fodder for machine learning training sets. Facebook and other social networking profiles mark the intersection of collective and individual forms of grief, where individual profiles—ostensibly acting as extensions of unique and embodied persons—become spaces for collaboration and interaction. A social media memorial reveals more about a network than about an individual user. Facebook’s updated memorialization policies reflect a growing awareness of the centrality of the network over the individual subject. If focusing on non-use, or forms of media refusal or disconnection, can help reframe narratives around production on social media

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platforms, then death also reveals the importance of networks or connective tissues between nodes.47 Absences in social media presence can disclose a lot. Only after someone’s death does the potential value of their aggregated communicative traces become visible. Digital objects are most valuable if they remain in circulation, accruing likes and fame with time or otherwise retaining their significance. The transformation of small virtual cemeteries and ephemeral web memorials to millions of Facebook pages reveals how the social media memorial has become an expected aspect of contemporary mourning rituals. In a relatively short time span, there has been a substantial cultural shift in attitudes toward social media profiles, particularly in the treatment of social media memorials. By tracking immediate journalistic and popular responses to the Virginia Tech shootings, I happened to catch a glimpse of social media history in the making. Designing for Death

The persistent profiles of the dead slowly became fixtures on Facebook, but it wasn’t until the Virginia Tech massacre that Facebook’s memorialization gained mainstream recognition and acceptance. That is also when the value of dead people’s profiles became obvious to users and platforms alike. Facebook has struggled to accommodate dead users and their loved ones as the company grows and its demographics change. In 2007, college students still dominated Facebook, but that situation shifted after Facebook opened to the public and baby boomers joined the site to connect with family members or long-lost friends. In 2018, people aged fifty-five or older represented the second-largest demographic on Facebook, indicating that its user base was aging.48 Based on existing demographic and advertising data, the popular webcomic xkcd speculated that the number of dead Facebook users will outnumber the living by the 2060s if the platform declines in popularity, or by 51

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the 2100s if it remains as popular as it is today.49 Since xkcd produced its tongue-in-cheek mortality-table comic, numerous scholars have made similar predictions. In 2019, for instance, researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute predicted that 1.4 billion dead users would be on Facebook by 2100—that is, if Facebook and humanity are still here— and dead users will outnumber the living by 2070.50 Such statistics are regularly cited in the media, creating buzz around Facebook’s evergrowing graveyard, even if such calculations are merely speculative. Facebook boasts 2.7 billion users and extends to nearly every part of the globe, not only structuring people’s social interactions but also playing a role in disinformation campaigns, right-wing violence, and, in cases like the targeting of the Rohingya in Myanmar, genocide.51 For many reasons, Facebook is a symbol of unchecked corporate greed and a dire need for new antitrust regulation.52 Conversely, Facebook’s size and relative longevity have also made it a conspicuous site for mourning and memorialization; as more people use Facebook, more of them die and leave their profiles behind. Facebook has become entangled with contemporary memorialization, which demonstrates the lasting affective significance of profiles as special kinds of mourning objects. As a result, Facebook has a tremendous amount of power over memorialization. Virtual memorials rely on the policies, settings, and longevity of corporate entities. If Facebook goes offline—if it goes bankrupt as a company, is sued out of existence, or is forcefully shut down—a multitude of virtual shrines, including Maxine Turner’s, will go with it. With Facebook’s rebranding as Meta, past memorialization notices now contain the new logo, an indication of how unstable corporate memorial spaces really are. Web ephemerality threatens Facebook’s role as a long-term graveyard; Facebook may seem too big to fail, but it probably will not last forever. After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, a web-

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site called Perpetual Memorials hosted memorials for the victims. The company intended to create memorials that would persist “on the Internet throughout ages to come,” but the website itself ceased to exist in July 2003.53 Web-based memorials last only as long as people continue to maintain them or particular companies remain open. Concerns about the potential ephemerality of web memorials are in part what prompted major social networking websites to draft memorialization policies. Unlike physical monuments or gravestones—or impromptu memorials like ghost bikes or flowers and crosses left at death sites—digital memorials depend on the design choices and durability of corporate social media platforms. Big technology corporations are increasingly at the center of collective mourning and memorialization, sometimes eclipsing more official state-backed monuments. After the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, for example, companies such as Uber and Amazon expressed solidarity with the victims by displaying France’s tricolor flag.54 Facebook provided Parisian users ways to interact with and process the attacks by introducing a function to help them notify their social networks about their safety status. Facebook also enabled users from around the world to participate by invoking the tricolor flag in their profile photos. A similar attack in Lebanon that year did not spur a safety-check feature, which is indicative of how corporate platforms value some users’ lives and deaths more than others.55 The design decisions and technological affordances of platforms like Facebook determine what mourning looks like and can subsequently impact people’s legacies, sometimes inflicting new harms. This is especially significant when private citizens are publicly mourned. The information scholar Tonia Sutherland describes how a public Facebook search for Trayvon Martin now “yields memorial pages, images of white people in blackface and ‘Trayvon Martin’ costumes, several results for Trayvon Martin pages that are not hosted or

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populated by Martin’s surviving family, and pages for activism on the part of Facebook community members inspired by the case.”56 Sutherland argues that Black bodies have become archival documents curated by corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google. Indeed, shootings and other violent acts are caught on Facebook Live, allowing those livestreaming the events to bear witness. Videos are then circulated after the fact as evidence, spectacles, and mourning rituals, depending on the context. Platforms’ participation in mass mourning rituals, and their control over people’s legacies, can be deeply troubling for users. Although Facebook’s updated memorialization policy went into effect in 2007, the company did not officially publicize it until 2009. Facebook codified its memorialization policy after a rather embarrassing oversight. Because Facebook’s algorithms and its own engineers could not distinguish between the living and the dead, a new function called Reconnect was introduced in October 2009 and suggested that users reconnect with dead friends.57 The feature was supposed to bring lapsed users back into the Facebook fold, encouraging people to get in touch with those who had not been active on Facebook in recent days. Unfortunately, many inactive users were staying away from Facebook for one simple reason: they were dead. The timing, right before Halloween, was also insensitive. Many users were disturbed, sparking a backlash. Once again, Facebook’s focus on active individual users neglected to take into account the inactive but still important profiles of dead users. Such oversights have prompted some who study human-computer interaction to argue that designers should consider mortality when building systems, baking an awareness of death in to the platforms themselves. Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise refer to this as “thanosensitivity” and ask, “Do users think about their own deaths or the death of others when they respond to questions about how they would like software to be designed?”58 As social media ex-

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pand to include older demographics, and as younger generations consider their own mortality, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, the problem of caring for the profiles of dead users seems more pressing than ever. The Reconnect debacle prompted Facebook employees to publicly acknowledge memorialization. On October 26, 2009, Facebook employee Kathy H. Chan published an official company note titled “Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook,” in which she explains how the sudden death of a close friend and co-worker in a biking accident inspired her and other Facebook employees to consider the problem of memorialization. For herself and others, it was their first real encounter with death. Chan portrays the option of memorializing profiles as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable and unforeseen consequences of new features intended for active, living users: “By memorializing the account of someone who has passed away, people will no longer see that person appear in their Suggestions.”59 According to the post, memorialization changed the privacy settings of profiles “so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased’s privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance.” Facebook recognized that dead people’s profiles required different kinds of care than those of the living and that, while memorialization was important to many users, the company had to find a better way of distinguishing the profiles of the living from those of the dead. Facebook has refined its policy several times since 2009. On February 12, 2015, the company announced its new Legacy Contact feature, which enables a designated family member or friend to steward a dead person’s account. Individuals can now preemptively

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appoint a profile guardian, and when someone informs Facebook officials that a person has died, the designated Legacy Contact can do the following: Write a post to display at the top of the memorialized Timeline (for example, to announce a memorial service or share a special message). Respond to new friend requests from family members and friends who were not yet connected on Facebook. Update the profile picture and cover photo. If someone chooses, they may give their legacy contact permission to download an archive of the photos, posts and profile information they shared on Facebook. Other settings will remain the same as before the account was memorialized. The legacy contact will not be able to log in as the person who passed away or see that person’s private messages.60

Legacy Contact allows both Facebook and its users to differentiate between profiles of the living and the dead by overtly marking the profile of a dead person with a header reading, for instance, “Remembering Jane Doe.” Another embarrassing moment for Facebook occurred shortly after the presidential election in November 2016, when a glitch accidentally memorialized the accounts of many users, including Mark Zuckerberg’s. I was surprised to find myself memorialized. As far as death glitches go, this one was rather amusing. Despite these setbacks and snafus, Facebook clearly recognizes the subtle monetary value of dead people’s profiles. The dead continue to serve as connection points within social networks, even if they are impervious to advertisements. As Facebook’s demographics continue to change and as more memorialized profiles accumulate, the platform can still rely on mourners to return to these pages. Legacy Contact is a compelling effort because it codifies memorialization practices on a social networking platform, but there are no

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“Remembering Tamara Kneese” (Screenshot by Tamara Kneese, November 11, 2016)

guarantees users will actually use this new service. In the spring of 2019, Facebook made yet another announcement. It added a “Tributes” section, enabling more controls for Legacy Contact. In its press release, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “Over 30 million people view memorialized profiles every month to post stories, commemorate milestones and remember those who have passed away.”61 Facebook, of course, has data on how many people view the profiles of the dead, and thirty million is not an insignificant number. Facebook also strategically understands that unregulated memorialization can be painful for people who want more control over how they remember their dead loved ones. The press release promised stronger artificial intelligence (AI) to help guide the company, preventing unfortunate memorialization mishaps in the future. So far, it is unclear exactly how AI, whatever that means, could solve the problem of user death.

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Another problem is that users have not exactly flocked to Legacy Contact. In an effort to be sensitive, Facebook does not advertise Legacy Contact but keeps it in the background as an option. It is very difficult to entice healthy, or at least not terminally ill, users to plan ahead for their own eventual deaths. Appointing a relative as a legacy contact is a bigger step than many individuals would choose to take. The informatics scholar Jed Brubaker, who was part of the Facebook team that created Legacy Contact and still occasionally works for Facebook as a consultant today, told me that when a person elects to use Legacy Contact, the death and mortality team at Facebook examines notifications about the supposed dead person and verifies that the person is in fact dead.62 After that, the account can officially be memorialized or, if the person requested it ahead of time, it can be deactivated or deleted. Based on extensive qualitative research encompassing hundreds of interviews with mourners, Brubaker prevented appointed legacy contacts from having direct and total control over dead people’s accounts by design. He worried that people would impersonate the dead through their profiles and further upset or confuse their loved ones. Legacy Contact features are designed to limit the impact that people can have on the accounts of the dead. They can change the profile or cover photo, pin a message to the top of the profile, and accept friend requests on the person’s behalf, but they cannot log in to the account and post as the dead person. Facebook’s problems with death have only increased as the platform has ballooned in size and scope. Brubaker explained the difficulties of assessing the number of dead people on Facebook and the best ways to care for them. Facebook relies on a combination of its own marketing data and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mortality databases to come up with a figure. It can look at various age groups and then cross-reference that information with mortality databases to

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create an estimate. Still, it is difficult to determine exactly how many dead users there are on Facebook. Figuring out the number of dead people on Facebook is “a really hard problem,” Brubaker told me. Nate Lustig, founder of the digital estate–planning company Entrustnet, used Facebook’s user data and CDC mortality rates to estimate that “580,000 US based Facebook users will pass away in 2012 and 2.89 [million] will die worldwide.”63 Lustig was extrapolating those figures based on U.S. data only, so, as Brubaker told me, he is unconvinced of its accuracy: “We don’t have the numbers even in the U.S., let alone for the world. Do these records exist in all parts of India? No. . . . People will take the numbers they have in the U.S. and apply them to the rest of the world.” Brubaker wonders how much Facebook’s approach to memorialization, including Legacy Contact, is anchored in a Western notion of subjectivity and embodiment: “What if we unknowingly exclude other sets of cultural practices?” This is important because privacy laws and cultural practices regarding the dead are different in other countries. As Facebook grows in scope and scale, death becomes a bigger thorn in its side. Brubaker provided me with some figures he can be more certain about. He recommends thinking about dead users as nodes in an entire network: 1.7 million people in the United States who use Facebook will die this year, which will directly touch 511 million relationships, meaning there will be 511 million unique experiences of loss. Even beyond the boundaries of people returning to friends’ profiles to grieve, there are also people who may witness their friends or acquaintances grieving on Facebook. Lurking ensures that many more people than just close family or friends alone will see posts about death. By adding this second level of relationships, the number of people affected rises to seven billion relationships. As Brubaker put it, “This touches everyone.”

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I reached out to Facebook for a more official framing. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the company has shifted its policies to better match the changing needs of its users: For example, with the launch of memorialized profiles in 2007, we created a place for friends and family to remember deceased, mourn, and seek solace together—prior to this, our policy was to delete the account of the deceased. Recently, we’d heard from a lot of people that memorializing a profile can feel like a big step that not everyone is immediately ready for. That’s why it’s so important that those closest to the person who has passed can decide for themselves when to take that step. Based on what we’ve heard, we now only allow friends and family members to request to have an account memorialized. Since the introduction of memorialization in 2007, we’ve made significant updates to memorialized profiles, including the introduction of Legacy Contacts in 2015, which allowed people to choose a trusted loved one to care for their profile and digital legacy once they pass away. Now, with the launch of Tributes in April 2019, we’re expanding controls for those who manage a memorialized account. With Tributes, we’re creating a separation between the Tributes section and the deceased user’s original timeline to make sure that people can see the type of posts that are most helpful to them as they grieve. Additionally, we’re increasing our efforts to raise awareness of and encouraging people to select a Legacy Contact. Our priority is to provide communities with the best possible tools to honor loved ones and support each other while preserving the digital legacy of the deceased for generations to come.

Facebook has continuously attempted to address users’ changing needs around death. There has been a major shift in the company’s perspective since 2006, when it would remove the profiles of the dead, and the present day, when changes in Facebook policy have been made to reflect greater sensitivity to mourners’ needs. According to Face-

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book’s press release, the Tributes function supposedly uses AI to “keep the profile from showing up in places that might cause distress, like recommending that person be invited to events or sending a birthday reminder to their friends.”64 Despite adding Legacy Contact and now Tributes to its memorialization repertoire, Facebook’s algorithms are still unable to fully sort the living from the dead. Photos of dead pets or dead people without profiles of their own to be placed in a memorialized state may still appear in memory or annual review features. It is clear that death will be an ongoing problem for the platform. The policy of Legacy Contacts indicates that Facebook hopes profiles will persist as sacred transgenerational objects. Facebook is opposed to deletion, with a spokesperson stating in an email to me, “We strongly suggest people discuss the decision to delete their account with family and friends, as it can be painful for family and friends to no longer be able to visit the profile to view posts or photos.” Although the company spokesperson emphasized the possible effects of deletion on mourners, it is in the company’s best interest to maintain as many profiles of the dead as possible. Facebook hopes that “memorialization will provide future generations the opportunity to get to know their ancestors through their preserved original profile and the memories shared by friends and family in tributes.” Tributes has the potential to add another layer of context, giving depth to the preserved profiles themselves. They can in many ways act as virtual, interactive gravestones and as quick and easy ways to visit dead ancestors and learn more about their lives. The shift from Facebook’s pre-2007 approach to its memorialization policy after the Virginia Tech massacre indicates a transformation in how the general public viewed Facebook profiles. Facebook memorialization, and the subsequent move to the Legacy Contact feature, shows that an active user is no longer the only valuable entity in a network. Death has been enfolded into the logics of the network

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society, as users remain productive long after their deaths and corporations participate in mass mourning rituals. Legacy Contact acknowledges that dead users exist and that they should be treated differently from living users. But this shift is thanks to the work of mourning friends and family members after the Virginia Tech massacre, who recognized the affective value of their loved ones’ profiles even before Facebook saw the profiles of the dead as potentially productive spaces. The act of memorializing profiles redefines value and changes Facebook’s definition of participation. Activists like Juno Woods sought to preserve the profiles of dead loved ones, which they viewed as their digital mementos. Facebook memorialization is a potentially radical act, taking back something that had been appropriated by corporate interests. Memorialization first came about thanks to grassroots efforts and collective action and then continued to evolve because of cycles of user outrage and feedback. In the next chapter, I will show how, in addition to the design choices of platforms, the embodied labor of digital caregivers helps preserve the data of the dead.

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2 Networked Death

In September 1994 there was an index of the entire World Wide Web, and while dial-up was widely available, message boards ruled the internet. Tom Mandel, a futurist at SRI International, had a cough he could not shake.1 As a techie living in the heart of Silicon Valley, Mandel was “extremely online” well before that became a widely used term. He logged on to the WELL, an early electronic community that predated the web, and started a thread in a general subject area about his symptoms.2 He dubbed it the Local Bug Report. Mandel’s persistent cough turned out to be an indicator of lung cancer. Throughout his illness, WELL members sent supportive messages while Mandel shared the ins and outs of his treatments. In his final post, Mandel confided: I had another motive in opening this topic, to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I’ve done online since last October when my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn’t going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocate us. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew online—here, in TIME Online, on the Net in various “places”—I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn’t really have to leave . . . large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space. Not an original idea, but what the hell, worth the try.3

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He went on to say that his collected communicative traces might eventually be put to use in a “Mandelbot,” an avatar that could post in his stead. A decade before social media titans entered the fray, Mandel imagined a kind of digital afterlife. His afterlife, however, was contingent on the preservation work of many others. After Mandel died, Paper Magazine co-founder Kim Hastreiter kept the Local Bug Report on her personal hard drive for twenty years, uploading the logs to new computers as technologies became obsolete. In 2015, she published Mandel’s collected online interactions as a book.4 His illness, dying, and death—along with the communications of a close-knit network—are captured in large part because of her efforts. In her introduction to @heaven: The Online Death of a Cybernetic Futurist, Hastreiter admits she was a lurker on Mandel’s Local Bug Report forum; she followed the saga from afar and never personally interacted with any of the parties involved.5 Despite Hastreiter’s distance from Mandel, she felt a sense of intimacy with him. She also anticipated the historical importance of his public illness and death: “Looking back, I realize now that I had watched history happen in the ether through a community of pioneers who were planting the seeds for what social networking would become.”6 Invoking “pioneers” and “seeds,” she mirrors the language used by other techie visionaries— such as Stewart Brand from the WELL and John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation—tying both Mandel and herself to a rarified group of early adopters of nascent technologies. In the World Wide Web’s heady first days, Mandel’s online death was unusual. But with the rise of personal blogs and social media posts, nontechies can now easily share their illness trajectories with online audiences. Today, illness blogs and other forms of selfdocumentation persist thanks to loved ones who pay for domain names and perform other digital upkeep after a person’s death. Al-

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though blogs may in theory reflect the authorial voice of one person, they are in actuality produced and maintained by a collective. The story of Mandel’s illness, dying, and death is also the story of a network and the individuals who worked to secure his legacy. As a specific genre of digital remains, illness blogs are associated with affective and communicative labor, including care of the self and others, and they involve “highly intimate emotional, physical, and relational management associated with their illness.”7 Care work is a vital part of coping with cancer and its aftermath.8 In this chapter I show how caregiving practices during a long illness continue after an individual’s death. The production and maintenance of illness blogs rely on a network of human and nonhuman actors, from specific platforms, hardware, and servers to lurkers, commenters, co-authors, and surviving loved ones. In Marxist media discourses, digital labor is often associated with the production of content or the free labor associated with sharing, linking, or liking others’ posts, but recent scholarly interventions have called for more attention to back-end care, repair, and maintenance labor.9 “Invisible” labor—or often globalized, precarious, and feminized labor—is taken for granted, underappreciated, overlooked, or not generally considered part of digital production in the first place. Care workers of all stripes are not considered part of platform economy or of the workforce at large.10 Rather than romanticizing care, repair, and maintenance, it is important to situate such labor within power structures.11 Death is a point of breakdown that makes this work more visible, showing how human and nonhuman actors work together to manage and maintain the data of the dead. Although accounts are presumably intended for single users, all digital production is collective in some way. Where does the data of one person end and the data of another begin? Given this collaborative dance, perhaps being paid for “your” own data is not the wisest strategy when seeking justice.12 Rather than following an entrepreneurial, individualistic

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model of production, the data of the dead are forged and maintained through networks. As I argued in the previous chapter, the needs of ordinary users are often at odds with the immediate commercial interests of platform owners and designers. Platforms have not considered in full, and may not be able to address, the new kinds of work associated with the maintenance of digital legacies over time. Commercial platforms provide the backdrop for accounting for personal illness and are typically designed with a singular author “owner” in mind, which can create problems for those who do the support work in their production and maintenance. Domains disappear, LinkedIn prompts you to follow your dead spouse, an automated email “from” a dead friend appears in your inbox: these are the death glitches that happen when the long-term care of digital remains relies on an amalgamation of human and nonhuman infrastructures. This chapter explores the transtemporal, embodied dimensions of illness blogs, which are collaboratively created and maintained communicative traces that can become spaces for postmortem communication while forging new social bonds. I address the work of caring for digital remains through a cultural history of documenting illness and death online, focusing on how Tom Mandel’s online story of his illness and death tells a larger tale about an entire electronic network. I present findings from qualitative interviews with digital caregivers who helped shape their loved ones’ illness blogs and other communicative traces to show how afterlife imaginaries are often at odds with how legacies play out. The entrepreneurial logics of corporate platforms and startups are undermined by the unglamorous but essential labor required to maintain people’s digital remains. Anticipating Death

Unlike other kinds of digital remains, illness blogs are oriented toward death even as they are made by and for the living. In other words, while people may curate their Instagram and Twitter presences 66

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with a sense of preserving them for eventual posterity, illness blogs and related digital forms are intended to preserve people’s experiences with mortality as a state of being. Unflinchingly personal in their portrayal of the day-to-day struggles of living with illness, such materials are also shared with family members, friends, and broader networks of readers. Illness blogging anticipates finitude. Cancer, especially, carries with it a certain temporality connected to prognosis. Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals captures her experiences with breast cancer as a Black lesbian woman in the late 1970s, tying her personal pain and medical choices to collective power and politics, including her refusal to wear an awkward breast prosthetic after her mastectomy, while showing how environmental and structural racism made Black women more likely to die of breast cancer.13 This deeply personal accounting was intended to be public, offering comfort and inspiration to other women as well as serving as documentation of her life in the event of her death.14 In this way, Lorde’s testimony was a proto–illness blog. What becomes clear after reading Lorde’s work today is that not much has changed when it comes to public discomfort with cancer and cancer’s relationship to structural inequalities and experiences of time. Decades later, based on her own experiences after being diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and undergoing treatment, the anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain wrote an autoethnographic book, Malignant, that details how statistics allow people to hedge bets and imagine how long they might survive, although they are uncertain of the eventual outcome.15 The anthropologist and filmmaker Abou Farman refers to the experience of being told death is forthcoming as “terminality,” or living with the knowledge that one’s time is running out. When his wife and artistic partner, Leonor Caraballo, was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, Farman says there was no way out:

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“We spent the next eighteen months revising our temporal horizon, but in every revision, death was always a step ahead of us, the horizon was always one measure closer.”16 Terminality is a liminal state of being in which the medical establishment labels our bodies as beyond care, but we and our loved ones still go about our normal routines, boiling lentils on the stove or worrying about paying the bills.17 I juxtapose platform temporality with Farman’s terminality and ask: How do these divergent experiences of time impact the digital care of illness blogs? As artists, Farman and Caraballo continued to collaborate and produce new work in the face of an uncertain future. Together, they created sculptures and jewelry based on 3D printed images of Caraballo’s breast tumors, showing images of the objects on a Tumblr titled “Object Breast Cancer,” and they produced a film about the condition of terminality, daring to imagine what Caraballo’s death might look like.18 Illness blogs, like other artifacts that document terminal illness, have a particular affective weight because their writers are conscious of their being digital remains long before they become ways of remembering the dead. They are ghostly objects, calling attention to the possibility and probability of loss while also striving to document lives and their support systems. Illness simultaneously imbues life with value and threatens its existence. Similarly, an object’s transience makes it all the more precious.19 Illness blogs facilitate posthumous and posthuman relationships and are thus powerful examples of the machinations of platform temporality. On illness blogs and personal social media pages, the terminally ill imagine their own postmortem relationships, even fantasizing about how their loved ones will go on in their absence. After a person dies, such online remnants may then provide places for the living to interact with the dead and for mourners to communicate with established social networks as well as numerous individuals they know

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Image of a breast tumor from the Tumblr “Object Breast Cancer” by Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman (Courtesy of Abou Farman)

solely in an online context. The preservation of illness blogs relies on commercial platforms and the continued attention of mourners. Physical pain and embodied labor provide the impetus for these imagined worlds, as illness bloggers face mundane hardships while living with cancer. Illness bloggers practice self-care by sharing illness narratives, while close relatives or healthcare workers perform additional care labor. Those closest to the terminally ill person may send updates to social networks, post messages dictated by a sick person who can no longer type, or upload goodbye messages for a dying person after they take their final breath. In some cases, they take on editorial work, correcting typos to better reflect the person’s voice. This

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work is often done alongside changing bandages or colostomy bags, cooking or doing dishes, caring for children or other household members, and providing emotional support. Illness on the Early Web

Death helps surface the inner workings of and tensions in a community, and electronic communities are no different from others in that respect. Early online forums addressed illness and death, preempting the popularity of illness blogging in the social media age. Howard Rheingold, a writer, technologist, and former Whole Earth Review editor, describes the importance of the WELL to networked and social computing in his classic book The Virtual Community (1993).20 As an avid early WELL participant, he remarks how information about illnesses spread in the electronic community many years before WebMD afforded patients the ability to self-diagnose and before thousands of forums appeared covering every imaginable ailment.21 Rheingold recounts how he used the forum to gather information about his young daughter’s tick bite, highlighting the “inner sense of security that comes with discovering that real people—most of them parents, some of them nurses, doctors, and midwives—are available, around the clock, if you need them. There is a magic protective circle around the atmosphere of this particular conference.”22 Beyond the ability to share practical advice, there is also something metaphysical about interactions facilitated by the WELL. Rheingold describes the sacred community that formed around a user’s child who was diagnosed with leukemia: “Individuals who had never contributed to the Parenting conference [a forum in the WELL] before entered the conversation, including a couple of doctors who helped Phil and the rest of us understand the daily reports about blood counts and other diagnostics and two other people who had firsthand

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knowledge, as patients suffering from blood disorders themselves.”23 Working from a combination of professional and personal experience, people who had never met in person formed strong bonds over a serious illness and its treatment. WELL members hosted a virtual vigil and sent supportive messages to the child’s family. This was not a momentary or short-lived crisis, as the illness lasted for years: Phil, the child’s parent, continued to post updates to the community until his child’s death from leukemia in 1998. Some WELL members attended the memorial service, meeting in person for the first time. These exchanges documented a community’s rallying around a family. The nascent communities forming around illness, and serious and potentially terminal ailments in particular, inevitably encountered death. The WELL’s similar response to Tom Mandel’s illness and death impressed Kim Hastreiter. The interactions that Hastreiter archived constitute a history of social computing and mourning culture. The Local Bug Report was Mandel’s forum, geared toward sharing information about his experiences with late-stage lung cancer, but exchanges in the forum were part of a much larger network. It is not Mandel’s posts alone that make up @heaven. Rather, it is Mandel’s ongoing communications and the empathetic notes of support sent by fellow WELL users. To be sure, his updates range from humor to pathos, reflecting a big personality, but it is the interactive, sometimes meditative, aspects of the forum that make it so compelling. The Local Bug Report is a snapshot of not only one man’s personal narrative but his relationships over time. Communicative traces are also communal. It is significant that Hastreiter believed that Mandel’s interactions with the Local Bug Report’s participants would eventually be valuable. She took pains to preserve these records on her own hard drive and then made them into a physical book, a commodity that people can purchase. Social networking for posterity relies on physical

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infrastructures and the work of others who perpetually care for digital remains. At the time of his death, Mandel was noteworthy, even a “pioneer,” to quote Hastreiter, likening the early web to a frontier.24 Even if most people will not have books published about them, many people all over the world are generating digital archives pertaining to their lives, their illnesses, and, in some cases, their deaths. Mandel’s case is also unique. Unlike most illness bloggers who might have a smattering of readers, mostly consisting of friends and family members, Mandel’s legacy lives on in published books and articles in major news outlets. Journalist Katie Hafner wrote about Mandel in Wired, and after his death the New York Times published a story about him using transcripts from the WELL.25 Hafner eventually published a book, The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, where she describes the founding and history of the WELL through Mandel’s public death. Founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand in Sausalito in 1985, the WELL was a uniquely Northern California phenomenon. Mandel lived in Mountain View, worked as a futurist at SRI International, and was deeply embedded in Silicon Valley life. Hafner was encouraged to write this story by WELL members, including Rheingold. As the use of the word “seminal” in the title might indicate, the story is mostly told through the lens of male founders and innovators, from Brilliant and Brand to Mandel and Rheingold, and is not especially critical. As opposed to contemporary platforms that appeal to users on a mass scale, the WELL was in many respects intended for a niche demographic. WELL members were “Baby Boomers who had come of age during the ’60s, most of them male, many of them with postgraduate degrees.”26 As Hafner notes, Brand, Brilliant, and other prominent WELL members were alumni of prestigious schools such as Stanford and Phillips Exeter. The online network relied on pre­

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existing social networks tied to a privileged socioeconomic class, and Brilliant and Brand planned the WELL as a business venture, not just a community, per se. The WELL was also small, confined to those who had the technological wherewithal to find it and join. The WELL depended on face-to-face communication and social gatherings; though it was open to people anywhere, the Bay Area was its central hub. Mandel’s partner, Maria Syndicus, a prominent WELL member known as “Nana” to the community, threw a potluck WELL party in the fall of 1986 in Sausalito.27 There were similar potluck dinners every month. As the anthropologist Gabriella Coleman found in her study of hacker conferences, members of digital subcultures may also meet in person, reinforcing people’s online bonds through face-to-face encounters and informal moments like those experienced while eating together.28 On the WELL, in-person camaraderie translated into other forms of care: participants offered to pay for flights to visit sick relatives and sometimes helped cover the costs of medical treatments as a collective. Although early electronic communities like the WELL are associated with mostly male, geeky subcultures, they were not walled off from domestic life. Like Mandel, Syndicus worked at SRI International as an analyst, and the two coworkers had been sexually involved before Syndicus joined the WELL. At first, Mandel was reluctant to tell her about the network, but she joined using a childhood nickname, Nana. In their exchanges on the WELL, Mandel and Nana did not disclose that they knew each other—or that they were co-workers whose desks faced each other. So even though Mandel used his last name as his username, Syndicus’s identity was at first obscured by her use of “Nana.” Syndicus spent time in the Parenting WELL forum because she had two children from a previous marriage. As a single working parent, Syndicus knew well how to multitask. As she describes, “I’d be in the office working, and at the same time posting in conferences,

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sending email, and having a conversation in Sends. I’d be at home, cooking dinner, and logging on to check what was new.”29 Syndicus’s time on the WELL was intertwined with domestic chores. Her ongoing potluck dinners also contributed to the WELL’s social fabric, serving as a connection point. Social networks require social reproduction. The Local Bug Report, and Hafner’s account of Mandel and Syndicus’s “love story,” focused on Mandel’s experiences with cancer. But Syndicus had troubles of her own, which were overshadowed by the narratives around Mandel’s public death on the WELL. In the summer of 1989, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. Howard Rhein­gold and other WELL members took Syndicus to the hospital and supported her while she was on sick leave from work. Conversely, Mandel, unable to cope, severed their relationship. While Syndicus was going through her chemotherapy treatments, he sent her vicious emails and harassed her on the WELL; Mandel extinguished all of her sessions as soon as she logged on, making it impossible for her to participate in her community. In 1992 he started a topic called “An Expedition through Nana’s Cunt,” brutally mocking her for starting a relationship with someone new. Eventually, Syndicus asked WELL volunteer moderators (who also happened to be women) to intervene.30 The WELL was not perfectly designed and run. The memoirs of women in the industry, from the stories of Ellen Ullman to those of Anna Wiener, show how the Silicon Valley tech scene has long been sexist and racist.31 The notion of a democratic, open internet was largely imaginary to begin with. In a twist, it was Mandel’s own lung cancer diagnosis and illness that brought him and Syndicus back together. Syndicus moved back to the Bay Area to help care for Mandel during his illness and eventual death, helping him navigate his home while he was in a wheelchair and preparing his inhaler.32 Just before his death, Syndicus and Man-

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del married, cementing their bond in the eyes of the state. The last posts to the Local Bug Report bore prayers, love, and strength not just to Mandel but to Syndicus, intermixed with congratulations on their wedding. Mandel asked for his physical remains to be spread in the ocean near Honolulu and, according to Hafner, planned for his digital remains as well: “He left the rights to all his online writings—that is, those he hadn’t obliterated—to Nana.”33 Mandel also left behind plans for a “Mandelbot” so he could continue posting after his death, enacting a transhumanist fantasy. The story of Mandel and Syndicus reveals the power structures behind digital legacy.34 Mandel’s Local Bug Report, cataloging illness and death, was preserved as an important artifact of the WELL, eventually becoming a book. Syndicus, on the other hand, went through her own chemo and radiation treatments for breast cancer. Even so, she took on the role of caregiver during Mandel’s illness while also maintaining an archive of his online writings. He planned to live forever, at least in some form, through the WELL and its networks, as well as through Syndicus’s ongoing labor. Physical and digital caregiving go hand in hand, and gendered expectations around care work are often replicated when it comes to digital remains. What is missing from the pages of @heaven, the backstory of Syndicus and Mandel’s sometimes troubled relationship, is notable: Syndicus’s caregiving responsibilities in relation to Mandel and others and her own struggles with cancer. Enter Illness Blogs

People with cancer and other chronic illnesses found community and support on message boards and in discussion forums like the WELL. With the growth of the social web in the early 2000s and with the help of new sites like LiveJournal and Blogger, people created dedi-

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cated spaces for personal narratives and self-reflection. Rather than posting to a message board under a specific topic heading, people could craft long-form prose about their experiences, a form of public diary-keeping.35 Aside from Mandel’s Local Bug Report posts, there are other prominent examples of illness narratives that became books or were otherwise translated into permanent objects. Some illness bloggers achieve a certain level of fame, which is not always a positive experience. Lisa Bonchek Adams attracted a loyal following for her candid depiction of life with cancer, but her tweets and other social media posts also attracted the ire of critics. In one instance, the Guardian removed a blog post comparing Adams’s tweets to “deathbed selfies.”36 After Boncheck Adams died of metastatic breast cancer in 2015, her readers sought permission to turn some of her most popular blog posts into a book.37 Julie Yip-Williams, whose blog still exists online, also published a book, which she wrote to her children as a memoir of her life before and during her experiences with terminal colon cancer.38 But, for the most part, preserved illness blogs are attached to familiar platforms—Blogger, WordPress, Medium, or Tumblr. Rather than being intended for a specific electronic community like the WELL, colored by inside jokes and innuendo, they are open to anyone with web access. This does not necessarily mean they are widely read. Many illness bloggers have limited audiences of readers who are already close to them. Even so, they may occasionally attract the attention of strangers, perhaps those who share a common diagnosis or those who have a loved one undergoing treatment for cancer or another long-term illness. Illness blogs and other social media forms documenting disease and treatment can act as extensions of the self, providing the scaffolding for imagined far-away futures in the face of immediate physical suffering, existential anxiety, and possible death.39 Alzheimer’s patients sometimes use life blogs to prepare for death or disconnection and to

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form bonds with other patients who might link to the blogs on their own websites. Mediated memories are used “for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others.”40 Blogging is simultaneously about the desire to self-document and to connect with others who might share similar experiences. Even if one person authors a blog, blogs are collective endeavors. Multiple readers and commenters, as well as the protocols and interface designs of commercial platforms, contribute to their production. This is especially clear when it comes to the blogs of the terminally ill and the dead, as loved ones may physically care for them or post on their behalf. Caregivers may even interject their own voices into the blogs to communicate with wider audiences of readers. Collaborations between the living and the dead can be premeditated and intentional. Deborah Lynn Steinberg, a sociologist and feminist STS scholar at the University of Warwick, kept a cancer blog for roughly a year of her illness, documenting not just her own personal experiences with treatment and facing mortality but the politics of 2016: namely the shock of Brexit followed by the election of Donald Trump. She sent an abstract to a special issue on illness narratives that I co-edited with my colleague Beza Merid, along with David Serlin and Mara Mills, for Catalyst, a feminist STS journal. Deborah planned to submit an essay but was not certain of the shape that her contribution would take.41 She felt very much pressed for time. Before her death, she arranged for a close friend and colleague, the communication scholar Stuart J. Murray, to edit her blog posts and write a posthumous co-authored article with her. It would be Deborah’s last publication. Stuart wrote: Several days before her death, and knowing she would not live to write the essay she had promised for this special issue, Deborah Lynn Steinberg emailed me to ask if I would be willing to coauthor this piece with her—in her case, as we both knew then, posthumously. It

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would be our final collaboration, an essay incorporating and reflecting on her blog, which was live for about one year: from January 2016 to January 2017, but most actively from mid-September 2016.42

Deborah also wanted to preserve Dark Cloud, her illness blog, in some way, so, at Stuart’s suggestion, we as editors created a PDF file and added it to the Catalyst website. No matter what happens to the blog’s URL, the writing will survive for as long as the open-access journal does. Stuart imagined writing the article when Deborah was still alive but viewed it from the vantage point of mourning her: “Perhaps all authorship is co-authorship, and all writing a reckoning with the transitivity of death,” he wrote. Like their planned collaboration, Deborah’s blog is self-consciously a form of preemptive mourning for herself. Although the blog is publicly available, Deborah intended it for herself and her circle, an iteration of what the queer and feminist theorist Lauren Berlant would call an “intimate public.”43 Stuart noticed the moments when he appeared in her blog—casually, as “S”— and recognized other mutual acquaintances or friends. Even when he was not sure who a person was, he “felt connected to a wider community of interlocutors whose precise identity mattered less to me than the fact that they were there, listening.” They were all in it together. The collaboration of Deborah and Stuart reconciles Deborah’s experiences with terminal cancer with her academic voice and life’s work. Deborah struggled with her blog’s audience, lamenting the fact that she had only a few readers. As a respected senior scholar, her academic publications reached wide audiences; she contributed articles to popular outlets, often writing about the public, mediated mass mourning of celebrities like Princess Diana and David Bowie. But her illness blog failed to attract a large following, even if creating a large following was not the reason she set about documenting her experiences. Stuart balanced his attempts at copyediting and framing with

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the delicate task of representing Deborah’s voice. What was an imperfection or typo, and what was really her? Stuart tried to keep Deborah’s voice intact, not wanting to stretch her meaning or edit her voice away. In this spirit, he requested that we use different fonts to distinguish between his writing and Deborah’s. Stuart’s essay also revisits Deborah’s previously published scholarship, placing it into conversation with her illness blog and bridging the two bodies of work. Death exposes the importance of a robust social network: the story of one person’s scholarship or blog is bolstered by the often invisible labor of many others, especially close friends and kin who contribute to the creation and preservation of their work. As Stuart Murray says, all authorship is really co-authorship, something that feminist scholars have emphasized in recent years.44 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even more recently, singleauthored academic monographs have often been co-written by professors’ wives, especially for ethnographies, where men had trouble relating to women and sent their wives to gather data about half the population. Acknowledgments sections of books often thank a nameless wife for typing.45 Illness blogs, too, rely on collaboration. If they are to be preserved, archived, or published as a memoir, someone has to do that work. Death makes the importance of co-authorship and digital care labor much more explicit, but disability and chronic illness are also cases in which collective contributions are required. The feminist STS scholar Laura Forlano describes the assemblage of human and nonhuman devices that facilitate the functioning of her disabled cyborg body, viewing the technologies themselves as collaborators: “In caring for myself, I am enlisted into a practice of actively participating in, maintaining, repairing and caring for multiple medical technologies (rather than using them passively).”46 Caring for the self and for others necessitates an ongoing negotiation between the body and technology, as well as the spaces where they meet.

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Given such interdependencies, an illness blog’s author is a manifestation of what the STS scholar Hélène Mialet calls a “distributedcentered subject.”47 According to Mialet, in the same vein as tech innovation and Great Men narratives, Stephen Hawking was reified as a lone genius while he relied on a combination of machines, other bodies, and other brains to carry out his research and remain a prominent public presence. This paradox is mirrored in the intersubjective workings of illness blogs, in which one person’s digital possession exists and survives thanks to the actions of many, even as this collective labor serves to reinforce the notion that a blog is a singular emanation of the sick, dying, or dead subject. Human and nonhuman actors work together to navigate both illness and death. As the disability studies scholar Laura Mauldin found in her ethnographic work on caregivers who care for loved ones in their homes, technologies themselves are subservient to the ingenuity of the people who use them, although it is the tech that largely gets the credit.48 Caregivers, alongside their disabled or ill family members, learn to negotiate new technologies and make them work for them the best they can. Every day, people and their bodies adapt to meet the built environment, building on their own expertise.49 Death makes these networked relations more apparent. The problem, as I elaborate below, is that the platforms that enable illness blogging and other collaboratively produced communicative traces are designed with individual authors, not communities, in mind. Platforms do not anticipate death the way people do. Death leads to unforeseen encounters, becoming a glitch in the system. The Managed Network

Through my ethnographic research on illness blogs and digital care work, interviewing the loved ones of prominent illness bloggers about maintaining their blogs during their illnesses and after their deaths, I 80

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found that this form of collaboration was often emotionally difficult all around. It also started before the person’s death, in the moments when the blogger needed a little extra help posting while managing the illness. For example, Kevin Foley could no longer update his popular illness blog, Card Blue, so his spouse, Lee Ann Cox, posted on his behalf.50 After his death, Lee Ann alerted his online community of readers, as well as their extended social networks, to his passing. The blog’s last post, “Kevin Foley: 1979–2009,” tells readers that “cancer silenced Kevin’s voice on November 19” and points to the strong network of people entangled in this web of illness, dying, and eventual death: “To the people who have come to this site again and again, the strangers who are now friends, the people who have left comments of such heartfelt encouragement, the silent but loyal readers, your support has meant so much to Kevin and to me.” In my interview with her more than four years after the final post, Lee Ann disclosed that Kevin was not yet dead when she typed these words but lying in a bed next to her. Although she waited to post the message until after he passed, she wrote it before grief made it hard to complete this act of care. Lee Ann inhabited a liminal caregiving space in that moment, straddling the line between supporting a dying husband and carrying out the duties of a widow. She provided physical assistance to Kevin while also engaging in the maintenance of his blog, both an expression of his present struggles and a personal archive after his death. More than a decade after his death, his blog still offers a space for imagined communication between Lee Ann and Kevin while also attracting new readers and producing ongoing affective bonds.51 Kevin started Card Blue as a way of finding other patients with his rare form of sarcoma. Through blogging, both he and Lee Ann became virtually connected to other families struggling with the disease, even if they did not physically meet. In email correspondence with me, Lee Ann mentioned her fondness for Josh, a sarcoma blogger

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from Seattle, and his wife, Kim: “Kim and I are were particularly intimate between Kevin’s death and Josh’s and for a while after, though we never met.”52 Lee Ann and Kevin also read other sarcoma blogs together. In an email to me, Lee Ann wrote that visiting Lemmon Drops, the blog of a Minnesota woman who developed soft tissue sarcoma while pregnant with her second son, “still totally makes me cry, quite a powerful digital afterlife—I vividly remember wrapping presents before Christmas when Kevin came in to tell me Emilie had died. Very strange to feel heartbroken over someone you’ve never met.”53 Lee Ann developed relationships with the people who commented on Kevin’s blog, particularly after she took up the work of replying to them. One woman shared a heartfelt email Kevin had written to her about her daughter’s death from cancer. Although these interactions took place exclusively online, they are visceral memories. While Kevin blogged, Lee Ann took to Twitter to find community. In my interview with her, Lee Ann expressed her reservations about shifting her thoughts from a private journal to public tweets, asking herself, “Why am I exposing myself in this way?” She was torn, however, stating that “when you look at how private and uncomfortable we are as a society about death, I didn’t feel that or experience it. I wanted to put it out there. I think it’s good for the people who are experiencing it, those on the sidelines going through it.” Along with expressing her own difficult and sometimes ambivalent feelings about caregiving and widowhood, Lee Ann hoped to make others feel less alone. The public or semipublic nature of digital communications about illness and death means that not all readers are personally close to the posters. Only those in the know can be certain if an illness blog’s sudden silence indicates worsening conditions, remission, or death. If a kin member does not take pains to interject their own voice, readers may not know if the blogger is alive or dead. Illness bloggers commonly stop blogging during remission because the break in their

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illness means they are focused on other parts of their lives.54 One of my interview subjects, Pamela, described this thorny process in relation to her friend Sarah’s death from metastatic breast cancer. When Sarah’s illness blog fell silent, some casual friends and acquaintances assumed that Sarah was in remission and enjoying life, no longer focused on being sick. Those in Sarah and her husband George’s inner circle, however, knew that she was undergoing radiation treatment after her cancer metastasized: Sarah stopped updating her blog when she became too ill to do so. Close friends and family who were aware of Sarah’s worsening condition posted photographs of her on Facebook, sometimes accompanied by encouraging messages. Pamela, a close friend of Sarah, was particularly visible in her social media postings. As a result, acquaintances who were unsure of Sarah’s status privately Facebook messaged Pamela for updates. Different reactions to Sarah’s silence on her blog and the posting of photographs indicate the complexity of social networks when it comes to illness. Posting photographs of a healthy, smiling Sarah was an encoded act on the part of her close-knit network, understood only by close family and friends. For those on the outskirts of this core network, that meaning was unclear, and they sought out an explanation. Control over information determines who is a close kin member and who is merely an acquaintance. In some cases, ambiguity is purposeful, especially when it comes to posts about terminal illness. To negotiate relationships in platform environments, where colleagues or frenemies hang out with close kin, users might encode messages intended for specific audiences while casual onlookers will be confused by or misrecognize the actual meaning of the post.55 In addition to encoding messages, some of my interview subjects mentioned leaving potentially harmful or hurtful things unsaid. Lee Ann and Kevin read each other’s posts, even as they adhered to separate platforms. Because of her knowledge of what Kevin had written, Lee Ann modified

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her own posts. Instead of expressing her bitterness upon seeing the strawberry-flavored condoms at the pharmacy when picking up her husband’s medication, for example, she tweeted about the pharmacist’s insensitivity and her embarrassment at crying in public. She did not want to publicly call attention to her sadness over the loss of their sex life. Likewise, Kevin knew that Lee Ann read his blog and posted accordingly. As Lee Ann told me, “It’s Kevin talking to me. Once he couldn’t work anymore, he would post something, and I would read it in my office. I would know more intimately what was going on in his head.” Although both Kevin and Lee Ann wrote for wider audiences and for self-documentation purposes, they also used their writing to communicate as a married couple. In some cases, individuals purposefully obfuscate the status of a sick loved one. One interview subject, Sam, who maintains their brother Peter’s digital remains, highlighted this phenomenon. To hide information from Peter’s estranged wife, Sam made the updates about Peter’s health private on Facebook and did not publicly release general updates on his status. Although the Facebook group was private, some friends and family were invited to join the page, even if they were not especially close to Sam and Peter. Sam noted that some “annoying people” posted frequently, which Sam perceived as their way of pretending they were closer to the situation than they were or looking for attention. “Here’s my asshole cousin,” Sam exclaimed as they were looking through social media posts during our interview. While scrolling through the members of the Facebook group and looking at their posts, Sam remarked that they did not “even know most of these people.” Because some individuals were not actually close to Sam’s immediate family and might not have heard about Peter’s death, it was unclear if everyone who posted to the page knew Peter was dead. Sam told me that one commenter, in particular, wrote to Peter as if he were still living.

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If no one explicitly posts about a person’s death, it is possible that the person will continue to be perceived as alive. This ambiguous status can lead to misunderstandings and uncomfortable situations on social media pages and in face-to-face meetings. To avoid such awkwardness, digital caregivers do their best to curate and update digital remains while keeping some information at least nominally private. When a person dies, family members may post on the blog, which before had appeared to contain only the thoughts of the dying person. When Sarah became too sick to post on her blog, her husband, George, posted an update alerting her readers that she had moved to hospice care after radiation treatment had failed to slow her cancer’s progress. When she died, George posted again, providing details about her memorial service and describing the last days of her life. Whereas the comments on the blog had previously been addressed to Sarah, the new comments were intended for George. George expressed his gratitude for the messages and said that they would one day constitute an heirloom for George and Sarah’s young son. Similarly, Sam also posted many updates on their brother’s behalf. On Peter’s main Facebook page, Sam provided information about his health status and, months after his death, posted details about his memorial service. Surviving kin may feel a sense of responsibility and obligation to alert readers when a cancer blogger or active social media user dies, causing them to interject their own voices on behalf of their now-silent loved ones. Social media are inherently interactive and collaborative, but this collaboration intensifies when someone is dying and becomes even more apparent after the person’s death. Mourning loved ones may contribute their own voices to dying or dead people’s blogs or other social media pages to varying degrees. The whole network is embroiled in an individual’s death, but competing interests may necessitate demonstrations of insider knowledge and encoded messages, leading to uncomfortable or ambiguous moments.

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Terminal Identity

As they move from present to past tense, illness blogs take on new meanings. People who are sick or terminal may blog about their treatments and physical pain or simply relay anecdotes, a kind of matterof-fact record-keeping. They may also imagine possible futures without their presence, picturing themselves as spirits or ghosts. Their loved ones may eventually use these archived communicative traces to mark time, to mourn, and to connect with the deceased. The terminally ill person imagines the future, alternatively hopeful or grim, whereas the mourner looks backward. Kevin began Card Blue sixteen months after his sarcoma diagnosis: A while ago I began finding occasions to quote an aphorism to my wife and kids. “The best time to have planted an oak tree is 25 years ago. The second best time is today.” . . . I wanted to start writing after the first biopsy, then the second, then the CT scan and the PET scan and the MRI, after the first chemo and then the second, after all of the many hospitalizations and the dozens of radiation treatments and now, tenuously, after beginning to feel like a diminished but somewhat whole version of myself. I did write morose letters for my children, and occasionally funny e-mails to my friends, but I didn’t keep a journal of my illness. But the agony of facing this test makes me want to put something down. In some ways, it feels beside the point. It’s so late; so much has already happened. But I’m just going to go ahead and plant the damn tree today.56

His blog posts span the effects of his illness on his body, his fears about death, and the pain and frustration caused by the metastasized cancer. At other times he writes about his family, sharing funny details from daily life. In the act of writing, he is self-consciously aware of his legacy, in the forms of his sarcoma activism, his children, and the blog itself. Kevin concentrates on documentation and preservation for the future,

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making his tree metaphor poignantly apt. Kevin imagines his family’s life without him; he has “fantasies in which the story did not end, in which part of me remained to watch and help my wife and children as they made their way through life. I couldn’t—can’t—bear to imagine them going through the struggle without me, so I would sometimes catch myself conjuring ghost stories in my day dreams.” Picturing himself as a ghost became a source of comfort because, in this way, Kevin could remain part of his family’s life after his physiological death. In another, earlier, blog entry, Kevin resurrects the planting metaphor from his first entry. Rather than likening blogging to planting a tree, in this instance he mentions bulb planting. This is not just metaphorical, however, as he refers to planting physical tulip bulbs in the backyard, knowing that he might be dead by the time they bloom. He regrets not being able to visit a number of famous restaurants, start new writing projects, or enjoy the results of the bulbs he wants to plant, but he views both his blog and the bulbs as an investment in a future he will not experience. He ends by saying, “Last (for now), but not least: This year, damn it, I am going to plant some bulbs. I’m haunted, yes. But it’s not all bad.” He feels haunted because he inhabits a liminal space between his imagined ghostly future and his day-to-day existence as a cancer patient. Kevin believes that the dying must also care for the living: “We must ease regrets, soothe hurts, and build bulwarks of memory and love to offer some protection against the terrible, pressing absence ahead.” In his case, Kevin views the physical act of planting bulbs in the ground and his blog as something to provide his family with love even after he is physically gone. Perhaps not wanting to imagine a bleak future, caregivers focus on the immediate, practical tasks at hand, and social media may offer them outlets for ongoing stress. Lee Ann described it as a feeling of being in crisis mode. While Kevin blogged extensively about his physical pain, often including graphic descriptions, Lee Ann wrote about pain’s

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ability to divide them: no matter how vividly Kevin described his pain, Lee Ann could not experience it herself. She was also separated from him by her sense of preparing for widowhood, what she referred to as “widow rehearsal.”57 Those who mourn their loved ones may use social media to document their frustration and exhaustion or their fears about losing their loved ones. After the death of a loved one, they may then reread their own documentation alongside the archived illness blog to make sense of what happened. Lee Ann told me, “My reason for living for a long time was to fight cancer. . . . Even if that was exhausting, that was what I did. And all of a sudden, he was gone.” One week after his death, she tweeted, “Lying in bed, reading Kevin’s blog, wishing I could make Thanksgiving go away & him come back.”58 In August 2010, she tweeted about celebrating their ten-year wedding anniversary without Kevin there, and in September 2010, she celebrated what would have been his thirty-ninth birthday.59 Kevin’s blog provided Lee Ann with a way of connecting with him, while her Twitter feed was a way of marking time and documenting her mourning. Although long-term illness and death separated Kevin and Lee Ann, the traces of their different experiences still serve as connection points. During the caregiving process, and in the immediate aftermath of a loved one’s death, social media and blogs serve as outlets for reaching broader publics, providing practical information such as health-related updates or memorial service information. After a death, however, the communicative traces left behind may take on new meanings and become heirlooms rather than tools. The survivors may have long-term, complex relationships with these digital remains. Material objects and embodiment are similarly embedded in the preservation of digital remains. Lee Ann and other family members and friends actually planted the bulbs Kevin wanted to see bloom. Through her tweets, Lee Ann associated the eventual flowers with Kevin, saying that “we’ll see him in the spring” when the bulbs bloom.

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Lee Ann referred to celebrating the ten-year anniversary of her marriage to Kevin by herself, drinking a bottle of wine they had bought together on a trip to Italy. Through these transtemporal interactions and material objects, Lee Ann and Kevin stayed connected to a wide network. For Lee Ann, it was crucial for Card Blue to remain online and for people to continue to read it. After Lee Ann wrote a story about Kevin’s death for Salon, a reader commented to say how much she enjoyed reading Card Blue. Lee Ann’s public writing helped keep Kevin’s blog in circulation. Lee Ann also tweeted about her ongoing relationships with the families of other sarcoma patients. She mentioned Josh, who passed away roughly a year after Kevin did. She tweeted: “He died Monday, same age, same sarcoma as Kevin. Connection with Josh & Kim is unaccountable grace.”60 Kevin was gone, but the networks surrounding him and his blog continued to grow and change. Embodied Ambivalence and Digital Care Work

Digital caregiving intersects with material duties to the sick and dying, as well as other considerations after a person dies, including taking care of wills and plans for memorial and funeral services. The duty of gathering a dead loved one’s passwords or capturing and saving their digital photograph library is yet another task to be completed after sorting through clothing, records, and books. Care of the corpse similarly overlaps with care for digital remains. An act of love can also be demanding or painful. Feminist theorists have criticized the autonomist Marxist portrayal of immaterial labor as having to do more with the end product than with the relational aspect of exchange and production.61 Care labor, whether paid or unpaid, is a way of reinserting materiality and embodiment into discussions of post-Fordist labor.62 Not only is hospital workers’ labor physical, as in the acts of changing bandages or 89

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helping a patient eat, drink, or use the bathroom, but their emotional reaction to the work is also embodied, constituting what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor.”63 Managing one’s own emotional responses to keep a patient’s spirits up is part of the job. Thus, it is impossible to separate both material and digital forms of care from power relations. Some of the literature around care labor speaks to the ambivalence inherent to this kind of work, while other theories focus on low wages and care labor’s relationship to stereotypes of feminine nurturing or the concept of the care worker as a “prisoner of love,” motivated to work for low wages for altruistic reasons.64 Care for the self can also be a form of relational labor, but this is complicated by stereotypes about feminine nurturing tendencies, which can be applied to caregivers of any gender. Breast cancer patients’ care for themselves, as they undergo treatment and try to maintain their health, is a form of care work.65 Care work for others, not for the self, is perceived as a natural expression of women’s empathic capacities. These aspects of care work are seen as two contradictory and conflicting things, so women with breast cancer must balance care for others with self-care. Interactions between patients and caregivers, or even patients’ relationships with themselves, are undergirded by market valuations of affective forms of labor, notions of what feminized labor should look like, and the relational interactions of overworked, underpaid caregivers or patients who are physically exhausted but must still care for other loved ones. Illness blogs and other social media pages are spaces where this type of relational, ambivalent labor manifests. People reveal their candid struggles with illness and push back against stereotypes and taboos connected to illness. Illness blogs provide new forums for connectedness, moving away from individuality. At their best, they are feminist iterations of the most hopeful aspects of cyberculture, allowing people to share and produce new forms of knowledge away

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from medical expertise. But some illness blogs conform to beauty standards and other gender norms (the association of the color pink with breast cancer is one such manifestation) or are caught up in the attention economy or the workings of communicative capitalism.66 Similar critiques of other feminized online spaces, like mommy blogs and influencer culture, highlight these contradictions. Making problems and imperfections visible can draw attention to experiences that are often glossed over or ignored, but public narratives can come with their own pressures.67 For many cancer bloggers, the material and embodied effects of illness and the work of childcare or other aspects of everyday life are intimately tied to the work of blogging itself. For the blogging to happen, many other tasks have to get finished off-screen. When it comes to the creation and maintenance of blogs and social media pages in general, digital upkeep and domestic chores converge. As with other forms of repair and maintenance labor, there are often gendered expectations around who performs what kind of work, and who gets credit for it. Digital care work, much like physical care work, can induce a range of feelings: individuals may feel bound by duty to perform the work, or anxious at the same time that they derive pleasure from it. Just as caregivers of terminally ill patients can feel exhausted and ambivalent, the keepers of digital remains may feel equally so. Illness blogs are a special case as they combine several kinds of care work, including medical treatment, the circulation of illness narratives and other forms of self-expression as self-care, and concrete domestic and reproductive labor in addition to digital housekeeping. Sam, for instance, was in charge of capturing and preserving all of Peter’s digital photographs. They were annoyed by this, asking, “Why didn’t he do it himself? He knew he was dying.” Sam told me they were conflicted about their role as Peter’s digital legacy curator. On the one hand, they felt guilty, saying that they “should probably get

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on that” in reference to collecting all of Peter’s digital possessions. On the other hand, they were “sort of bitter” for being the one responsible for this work. Sam was also faced with having to capture the digital messages that Peter and his estranged wife wrote to each other before their relationship fell apart. The former couple had saved this discourse so that their daughter, Natalie, could eventually make her own decisions regarding her parents’ marriage and know that they did not always have a contentious relationship. Sam was charged with maintaining painful parts of their family’s past to secure future memories for Natalie. Not only did Sam experience some ambivalence about their new duties as a caretaker of digital remains; they also continued to experience Peter’s digital remains as material remnants. In our interview, Sam explicitly linked caring for their brother during his illness to caring for his digital remains when they said that they changed Peter’s “colostomy bags when he was alive and took care of his digital possessions after he died.” When Peter was in hospice, they changed his diapers and experienced a “range of intimate things, from giving someone a password to seeing my brother’s penis.” Now they keep photographs from his memorial service on a USB stick in their wallet. They also have many of Peter’s physical possessions in their home. For instance, some of Peter’s clothing is in Sam’s closet, and his physical possessions are generally integrated with theirs. The bodily and the digital are intermixed in life and in death. Taking care of loved ones’ digital remains has an inherently material component in that domain names and other infrastructural matters require payment and upkeep, which can also lead to points of breakdown and failure. Airdrie Miller, the widow of another wellknown illness blogger named Derek K. Miller, spoke on a South by Southwest panel in Austin, Texas, in March 2012.68 Evan Carroll, coauthor of the blog the Digital Beyond, chaired a panel titled “Digital

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Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death.” Carroll invited Airdrie to speak on the panel because she had uploaded Derek’s final blog post after his death from cancer. Derek’s last post subsequently went viral and became so popular that it crashed the server in May 2011, one type of death glitch that is attached not only to internet infrastructures but also to the attention economy. Expiring domain names pose problems for those who inherit illness blogs. Airdrie encountered some problems while maintaining Penmachine. She received calls from GoDaddy, a domain registrar, about the expiring domain name and the hundreds of dollars she owed for missed payments.69 Before Derek’s death, it had not even occurred to Airdrie that this would be a part of her digital caregiving duties. Lee Ann recounted a similar story about maintaining Card Blue. Lee Ann never canceled Kevin’s American Express card, and she noticed a mysterious charge from GoDaddy, although she had no idea what GoDaddy was. “They explained that he had registered Card Blue as a domain name,” she said. “It was the first time that it had come up for renewal, and I paid it. I said I’ll pay whatever it is.” If payments stop, digital remains cannot persist. Caring for digital remains in the long term is sometimes awkward for reasons aside from payments. During the panel discussion, Airdrie said that she was ambivalent about maintaining Penmachine. Only Airdrie knows the passwords to Derek’s accounts, so she wondered what would happen after she dies, or if anyone would care. Life goes on after the death of a partner. Airdrie mentioned her experiences on Match.com, saying that she was starting to date again. On the South by Southwest panel, other speakers discussed the possibility of turning dead loved ones into holograms or using digital remains to allow the dead to achieve a kind of physical immortality. Airdrie mused about what would happen in this futuristic scenario: If there were a robotic or holographic version of Derek, would she just put him in

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the closet when she went on a date? Would it be improper to turn him off? Airdrie explicitly referred to digital care labor as work. She said, “In a way, I feel like I’ve been burdened with this long-term chore now, to keep his digital life there.” Airdrie argued that digital remains are different from physical ones. She received prompts from Twitter asking her to follow Derek, which she found upsetting. Although his Twitter account may send such automated reminders, by contrast, she was able to place the urn with his ashes in a cupboard after she felt “haunted” by having it on the mantel. Now, she can choose to open the cupboard and say hi to Derek’s ashes when she chooses to do so. She said she would like to have this same amount of control over Derek’ s digital remains. Digital interactions with the dead can be alarming or comforting, depending on the context. In another death glitch, at the end of 2020, Derek’s blog disappeared and was replaced by a note saying that the entire blog would soon be restored. The post said, “Finally Returning! December 28, 2020: Derek’s domain and site contents have been returned to family, and the site will be restored to the original condition. There are thousands of files being processed for publication, and everything should be good to go within a week or so.” Many years after Derek’s death, his digital remains require continual care. Lee Ann experienced death glitches of her own. She told me that reading Kevin’s blog is comforting, but she described this as very different from when Facebook prompts her to “help him find his friends” or when Kevin’s last blog post appeared as the sole thing in her email inbox after a glitch in her workplace’s email system. That felt creepy, not like a meaningful connection. Automated, opaque interactions with dead loved ones can be unsettling, showing how platform infrastructures ultimately control how people are remembered online. Mourners may feel as though they cannot control interactions with digital remains, as prompts from commercial platforms may serve as

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unwanted reminders of the loss of their loved ones. The emotional response and uncanny feeling provoked by digital remains is embodied but also deeply networked, connected to relationships with human and nonhuman actors alike. Now that Kevin is gone, Lee Ann sometimes feels guilty that she is not doing more to maintain his digital afterlife: “What am I not doing that I should be doing? I am a terrible caretaker,” she told me. Although she continues to pay for Card Blue’s domain, Lee Ann felt anxious about the other aspects of Kevin’s digital remains she had not paid close attention to, including his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Kevin did not leave explicit directions for his blog but did give Lee Ann the password and a list of people to email to tell them that he had died. Lee Ann told me, “I wrote that last post when he was still alive, and he was still in the room. I wanted to have it ready to post when he died because there were so many people watching.” In the middle of caring for her dying husband, she also considered her digital duties, feeling obligated to post as soon as he died. She emphasized, however, that this felt like an “honor, not a burden.” The process was a melancholy one, but she hoped that it “did justice to him. It was a privilege.” Caring for digital remains is a material, embodied practice, most certainly a form of labor even if it is also an act of love, undergirded by structures of obligation and kinship ties bound by affective bonds. Illness blogs reveal the centrality of networks to the production and maintenance of digital media. Following the trajectory of illness blogs—from collaboratively produced personal narratives to interactive archives—highlights the importance of care labor, both physical and digital, to production. When death happens, previously obscured care labor is brought to light. Care work’s ambivalent qualities extend from life into death and beyond. The entrepreneurial logics of the early internet frontier and startup culture are undermined by the ongoing, multifaceted labor

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required to maintain digital possessions. No matter how prominent an illness blog may appear, there is a network of laborers, including platform infrastructures, involved in its production and upkeep. Electronic communities also necessarily brush up against embodied reality and material culture. Digital production requires more than a singular user, which becomes more obvious when a death happens. Blogging and other social media platforms are designed with single users or authors in mind; however, dying and death create glitches that expose the collaborative nature of digital production. Sometimes these glitches manifest in lost domain names or unchecked accounts; other times algorithms make it feel as if the dead are trying to make contact from beyond the grave. While social media platforms now contain promises that “anyone” can be like Tom Mandel, whose footprint and legacy are maintained long after his death, in reality that is not the case for most users. Some illness bloggers may be remembered for generations, their writings published as books or otherwise circulated after their deaths, but a great many more will be left as 404 messages and obsolete devices. Haunting is hard work.

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3 Disrupted Inheritance

When her father died, my mother took up the unenviable task of sorting through his files, all on paper. Next to receipts and notes on grammatical particularities of Latin and ancient Greek, there were tax records dating back to the 1940s. Although many of these items held no monetary or sentimental value, they had survived for decades because of his fastidious care and the hardiness of their papery existence. One day, I found a sheet of typewriter paper lodged behind a drawer in my grandfather’s desk, which I had inherited. The memorandum, dated December 18, 1967, was addressed to Alfred Snitzer, my grandfather, from an allergist. The note revealed that my grandfather had sensitivities to almost everything, from horses to orris root. A single sheet had escaped my grandfather’s impressive filing system and remained hidden for forty years. I felt a shock of excitement upon seeing the memo as I took in the onion-thin texture of the typewriter paper, the typos (my grandfather’s name was Albert, not Alfred), the archaic language, and the comically specific instructions. Perhaps if I had seen it next to a dozen or so similar papers, I would not have been so affected. But its singularity lent it an air of significance. After his retirement from the insurance industry, my grandfather began a second career in estate planning. He was meticulous with other people’s assets, and he put the same amount of care into planning for his own death. The records he kept so faithfully in life were of little consequence after his death, at least in his eyes. In the end,

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My grandfather’s allergy memo, shoved in a drawer and forgotten for more than forty years (Photograph by Tamara Kneese)

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they became refuse. For me, though, the note from his allergist and his letters to my grandmother during World War II, when she lived with her sister in Sunnyside, Queens, are as much heirlooms as the uncomfortable desk I am writing on. It is difficult to transfer feelings of value from one generation to the next, no matter how carefully we might plan for it. Objects may survive, but not their context or emotional weight. Today, digital assets—really an ecology of accounts, platforms, apps, devices, and metadata—further complicate matters. Whether tangible or digital, what is worthy of preservation? Obvious valuables like houses, property, stocks, or other assets with any monetary worth are passed on through legal wills. For items of sentimental significance, there is not always a clear protocol for who should receive what. Family photographs, letters, Bibles, costume jewelry, and dishware are claimed or unclaimed by relatives, perhaps fought over as much as the most financially valuable assets or circulated after an estate sale. Paper ephemera like tax records, grocery lists, Weight Watchers journals and such, and receipts are usually discarded, as they are not considered parts of an inheritance. Yet they can persist as autonomous documents because their survival does not directly depend on the longevity of specific technologies. These leftover bits can reveal a great deal about an individual and their social networks. Conversely, the digital versions of ephemera require commercial infrastructures, interfaces, or models that go out of style almost as soon as they appear. A digital estate is vast and often elusive, built on countless infinitesimal social interactions and affective flows captured over a lifetime. To care for the digital detritus of the dead is no small feat and requires the participation of many. When it comes to digital remains, kinship obligations collide with commercial concerns. There are potential conflicts between platforms’ terms of service and various state laws regarding the right of

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publicity, which determines who may control or profit from the commercial use of someone’s likeness.1 Legally speaking, people are not meant to pass digital accounts on to their next of kin, because contracts expire with individuals. Accounts should be deleted, deactivated, or, for platforms that have memorialization policies, placed in a memorialized state. Tech companies worry about impersonation and legal issues that could result from accounts moving from one owner to another. There is a mismatch between traditional estate law and the interests of corporate platforms. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as platforms grew in size, digital estate–planning startups filled this legal and social gap. When public officials and celebrities die, their estates often make decisions about how their social presences are to live on, but most people do not have estate planners, star lawyers, or social media teams to negotiate their posthumous social media feeds. Instead, digital estate– planning startup companies promise to organize people’s online possessions and make plans for their postmortem disposal or maintenance. Digital estate planning is an attempt to monetize the messiness of digital death by providing services to people who are planning for their own deaths or, in some cases, to mourning kin members who are struggling to manage their loved ones’ digital remains, searching for scattered accounts and passwords. (I use “kin member” in an expansive sense, beyond blood relations, following Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, and other feminist anthropologists.) Death care has long been aligned with business interests. Jessica Mitford’s influential book The American Way of Death, first published in 1963, traced the outsourcing of mortuary care from family homes to corporate funeral parlors as part of a broader culture of sequestering and monetizing death.2 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial life insurance policies replaced mutual aid societies and church-run charities, making it a moral obligation for workers to

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responsibly plan for and pay for their own burials.3 Today, startup companies arrange for burials and other forms of corpse disposal (such as turning your loved one’s ashes into a diamond), help people crowdfund their loved ones’ funeral and memorial services, customize life insurance policies—which increasingly rely on social media behaviors and self-tracking to calculate premiums—and maintain digital remains. Rather than going through estate-planning lawyers or funeral homes, consumers can shop for death care–related plans online, customizing services to fit their particular lifestyles, aesthetics, and needs from the comfort of their own homes. Where there is death, according to the journalist Eilene Zimmerman, “entrepreneurs see an opportunity to innovate.”4 Death-related startups are the latest trend in corporatized death care practices. From the perspective of major platforms, death is a problem to be solved. But for other corporations, including insurance companies and funeral homes, death is good business. Digital estate planning is one commercial strategy for solving the problem of deceased users that developed as both individuals and platforms realized that caring for digital remains was important work. The rise of digital memorialization practices—and the simultaneous equation of data with speculative value—has made the affective and financial significance of communicative traces clear. The networked, collaborative nature of digital production has also made this value difficult to exchange; who holds the rights to the communicative traces of the dead? Below I provide an overview of the field of digital estate planning based on interviews with founders of digital estate–planning startup companies and estate-planning lawyers, as well as my own participation in digital estate–planning processes. Although the digital death care industry is an extension of existing death entrepreneurialism, it is also a radical departure from traditional death planning and management attached to legacy institutions. For one, digital estate planners depend on venture capitalists’ investments.

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Following the startup model, many digital estate–planning companies are built to fail. Web-based companies promise to keep your data alive forever, but digital estate-planning startups are erratic. Unlike other death glitches in which death is overlooked, digital estate–planning startups start with death and monetize it, but startups themselves are likely to wither and die, making it difficult for them to successfully intervene in the long-term preservation of communicative traces. Generational shifts are central to my analysis, as digital estate planners arbitrate the transgenerational transfer of digital objects and values. Emerging digital estate–planning collectives are attempting to follow new business models after the first wave of startups came and went. Digital estate planners struggle to bridge affective and monetary definitions of value while imbuing their companies with their own social values. The industry aligns with other death care management businesses such as life insurance companies and estate law firms, but its dependence on startup models makes its task almost impossible. The companies that try to secure digital assets for future generations are likely to fizzle out before a transgenerational transfer can take place. What happens when platform temporality meets ancestral timescales? Digital estate planning reflects a yearning to bridge these incompatible systems of time and value, trying and failing to apply planful protocols to the messiness of networked death. Death Management

Whether digital or not, the business of death management is fundamentally data management, and today’s digital estate planning has origins in earlier industries, such as life insurance. Corporations have long offered “solutions” that allow them to profit from social and cultural needs surrounding death. Today’s death startups are part of this longer history. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the big names in American life insurance—Prudential, Metropolitan 102

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Portrayal of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Filing Section, circa late nineteenth century (Courtesy of MetLife Corporate Archives)

Life, John Hancock—negotiated death through a chain of bureaucrats, back-office workers (often women), and tabulator technologies.5 Insurance companies managed the dead as data through punch cards and massive physical storage facilities, using mortality tables and other pre-digital algorithmic instruments to predict death and subsequently profit. The insurance industry was inextricably linked to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the eugenics movement; life insurance accounts for mortality, but it also categorizes some lives as riskier or more valuable than others.6 Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, planning for one’s own death became a mark of virtue as the working classes adopted industrial insurance policies to protect their families from ruin after a 103

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breadwinner’s death.7 Insurance was associated not just with better life expectancies and maximized productivity but with spirituality. Dying responsibly became a moral calling. Mortality is supposedly a metaphysical phenomenon that lies outside of market fluctuations, but life insurance companies learned to commodify death and put a speculative value on human life.8 Mutual aid and community support provided financial assistance to widows and children before the nineteenth century, but in the mid-nineteenth century, the sociologist Viviana Zelizer writes, “the financial protection of American families became a purchasable commodity.”9 The life insurance industry expanded with the growth of urban centers and manufacturing, with the largest companies in cities such as New York and Boston. Zelizer claims that “life insurance was part of a general movement to rationalize and formalize the management of death that began in the early part of the nineteenth century.”10 Speculation went from being morally suspect to acceptable, even mandatory, as a means of providing for family members after death. This expectation is predicated on the notion that people should plan for their own demise by purchasing life insurance policies, making burial arrangements, and organizing their estates.11 Materials promoting life insurance reveal the imaginaries behind companies’ business models and mortality tables. Major insurance companies portrayed responsible death as an extension of family life and workplace productivity. In an industrial life insurance pamphlet published by the Prudential Insurance Company of America in 1918, Protestant self-reliance takes center stage. Through industrial life insurance policies, policyholders were able to pay small deposits every week, helping poor individuals to “save steadily, a little at a time, week by week.”12 The working class was the pamphlet’s intended audience. In one image, a widow dressed in black sits reading to the toddler on her lap while another daughter looks on and her son sits reading at a

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table. The family is shown in comfortable surroundings even after the breadwinner’s death, with art on the walls and a Tiffany-style lamp on the table. A caption states, “This home was Prudentially protected.” On the adjacent page, the same woman is shown in an empty dwelling as men in overalls carry away her furniture and a well-dressed man, who appears to be managing the repossession of her belongings, takes inventory. Her baby is in tears, and the other children are missing from the portrait altogether. The caption reads, “This one was not.” The implication is that the breadwinner was personally responsible for his family’s destitution because he had failed to preemptively manage his own death. According to the pamphlet, domestic bliss was entirely dependent on the male worker’s sustained productivity and his careful planning toward a responsible death. In twentieth-century America, the white-collar corporate structure, as famously depicted by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, shaped the insurance industry, with friendly door-to-door insurance agents selling polices, pitching personal responsibility and family values.13 Legal wills, along with life insurance policies, allowed middle-class men to organize their properties and bank accounts, providing for their families after their deaths. Race-, class-, and gender-based hierarchies and mortality tables determined which workers were deemed worthy of investment and protection by major insurers, but it was insurance agents who made these calculations. Frederick Hoffman, a statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company in the early twentieth century, traveled to graveyards to record the birth and death dates of white Southerners to predict their future mortality and figure out which regions were deserving of Prudential’s time. Hoffman also visited hospitals and sanatoriums to observe care practices and living conditions. Prudential captured data from the dead as well as from the living, making assumptions and predictions about entire populations.14 Prudential refused to insure poor Black Southerners or people

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Drawings in a 1918 industrial insurance pamphlet by the Prudential Insurance Company of America (From the author’s personal collection, photographs by Tamara Kneese)

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living in areas with high illness or mortality rates, which left them without protection. Responsible death practices were intrinsically tied to existing social and racial hierarchies. Life insurance and financial planning, which preserve the status quo, are also tied to growing wealth inequality. American estate law underwent major changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most significant shift was the decreasing importance of the will concurrent with the rise of the trust. As the legal will diminished in importance and primogeniture faded away, trusts became a way of controlling wealth across generations. In a trust, various assets are bequeathed to a trustee, who manages all of them on behalf of several beneficiaries. This system also conveniently bypasses the cumbersome probate system.15 Private family foundations, often with family members at the helm, provide some philanthropic cover as tax shelters while maintaining family names. Unlike the kinship-based system of inheritance practiced by the non-elite, trusts and foundations are legal instruments that allow elites to maintain wealth and power across generations.16 Paid professionals like bank trustees and other bureaucrats help to manage these entities that allow a family’s name to persist, extending far beyond the bloodline. Professional estate planners joined this network of bureaucrats in the mid-twentieth century, helping wealthy citizens avoid both inheritance taxes and probate through the implementation of trusts.17 Estate taxes acted as a major source of revenue for the federal government during times of war or crisis. Starting in the 1930s, the United States government dramatically raised estate tax rates, which reached a maximum rate of 77 percent, the rate in effect from 1941 to 1977.18 Unsurprisingly, this timeline coincides with the growth of the estateplanning industry. According to its website, the Boston Estate Planning Council was founded in September 1930 and is the oldest continuously run estate-planning group in the country.19 By the early

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1960s, the need for a national association spurred the creation of the National Association of Estate Planners and Councils (NAEPC). Today, the NAEPC includes various types of professionals who contribute to estate planning: attorneys, accountants, insurance financial planners and trust officers, and certified financial planners.20 Estate planning thus grew in tandem with other actuarial careers, such as those in life insurance and accounting, as a means of managing risk and assuring financial bets long into the future.21 Digital Assets

Digital estate planning is tied to this twentieth-century lifeworld but also marks a major departure from it. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, fewer than half of Americans had wills or life insurance policies through their employers. New startup companies hope to revive the declining life insurance industry by appealing to younger generations, calculating premiums based on Apple Watch tracking or other habitual metrics.22 What’s more, standard legal wills do not account for the digital possessions people accumulate over a lifetime, so transferring these items is tricky. The generation typically referred to as millennials in the United States has been the subject of books about the failures of the American dream, how student debt, skyrocketing housing costs, the Great Recession, and the rise of the gig economy have all conspired to withhold home ownership and middle-class comforts from a generation.23 Of course, there are many groups for whom the American dream was already foreclosed, as documented by marginalized communities swindled by the promise of home ownership or higher education through subprime mortgages, redlining, unfair lending practices, and corrupt institutions.24 But even if they do not own many tangible assets, many people have digital possessions they care deeply about. People’s affective attachment to communicative traces has created a whole new category of items that 108

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linger after a person’s death. In the parlance of digital estate–planning companies, they are “digital assets,” semantically connected to tangible assets like houses, bank accounts, and investment portfolios, even if many of these digital items carry more affective significance than personal monetary value. The insurance companies, probate lawyers, and financial planners that once managed the dead are not necessarily prepared to organize a digital estate. Digital estate–planning startup companies are attempting to fill this gap as people’s aggregated personal data have become sources of revenue for corporations and advertisers, as well as ghostly inventories of intimate connections. Often founded by young and eager entrepreneurs with backgrounds in technology, advertising, or law, digital estate–planning companies organize password information or final wishes regarding online accounts, passing them on to designated loved ones after someone dies, along with funeral instructions or goodbye letters. In some cases, they also more directly connect to end-of-life and mortuary care, putting all of a person’s death plans in one convenient online basket. Digital estate planning is appealing because of its direct nature, low service costs, and distance from the legal system. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, dozens of digital estate–planning companies emerged in many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Sweden, Belgium, and Germany. Information scientists Evan Carroll and John Romano founded the popular blog the Digital Beyond in 2009 to track emerging trends in personal digital archiving. Digital estate–planning services and apps targeted different markets, with some using the dullest legalese, likening themselves to “Swiss banks” (for example, SecureSafe, Legacy Locker, Cirrus Legacy), and others showcasing their design skills, playfully using death symbols like cartoonish grim reapers and humor to offset the seriousness of death (such as LivesOn, Deathswitch, Dead Man’s Switch, If I Die).

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During the first wave of my research, I interviewed the founders of Deathswitch (launched in 2006), Legacy Locker (2008), Dead Man’s Switch (2010), Cirrus Legacy (2012), and Perpetu (2013), along with Evan Carroll from the Digital Beyond (2009). I also joined these services and catalogued my experiences with them, including the glitches and moments of discomfort I found along the way. Even though many of the companies I studied have disappeared, new ones keep replacing them; entrepreneurs and investors alike still see something of value in the premise of digital estate planning, even if the execution rarely goes as planned. Despite its flaws and commercial volatility, the practice of digital estate planning is indicative of how important personal data have become. Securing digital assets and turning them into heirlooms reveals a desire to make data matter. The needs of ordinary users, however, may not coincide with the interests of startups or corporate platforms. Why have entrepreneurs poured time, money, and energy into digital estate–planning enterprises, and what are the legal, social, and technological reasons for their failures? Many digital estate planners are personally touched by death and view their enterprises as a moral calling. Digital estate planners’ strategies change as millennials and younger generations age and consider their digital legacies along with their own mortality. Digital estate planners are startup founders and self-described entrepreneurs, but they also hope to mediate a changing set of social norms across generations. Digital assets are in some ways a democratizing force. Although estate planning was designed to maintain wealth across generations, dealing with property such as land, houses, jewelry, and financial trusts, digital estate planning is more accessible because of its affordability (many of the basic services are free, with a nominal fee for premium memberships) and its general applicability. Even if they do not own substantial amounts of property, many individuals—particularly

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those bearing the brunt of the never ending financial crisis, structural racism, and widespread austerity measures—may view their digital assets as potentially valuable heirlooms. Although digital estate–planning startups, along with the larger platform infrastructures they are tied to, are a departure from legacy institutions, they still assess and categorize individuals according to value and risk. Business lines of credit are often linked with precarious forms of gig or freelance work as opposed to full-time employment and are a way of racking up debt.25 Individuals who use GoFundMe, Venmo, Cash App, and other digital payment systems are subject to companies’ terms of service and algorithmic risk assessments rather than legacy institutions’ rules and regulations. In the same way that banks and insurers have long discriminated against marginalized communities, these seemingly more democratic payment infrastructures reproduce many of the same problems while making responsibility more difficult to pin down because of black box algorithms and confusing, ever changing terms of service. The shift to startup models for death care reflects a larger cultural and structural transformation. In the Victorian era, buying life insurance became a moral responsibility and spiritual practice, allowing a breadwinner’s family to bury him and survive in his absence (and I am purposefully using male pronouns here, as the breadwinner ideal type was exclusively male). In the early twenty-first century, as life insurance has waned in popularity and is no longer provided by most employers— especially for employees in part-time, freelance, gig, or otherwise structurally precarious positions—crowdfunding campaigns fill in for life insurance for those who are unable to prepare for their own burials. Because of institutional malevolence or abandonment, compassionate volunteers donate to campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter or GoFundMe to bury the unfortunate dead.26 Crowdfunding has itself become an after-the-fact, ad hoc form of life insurance. Like many other aspects

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of the platform economy, death care is a just-in-time, on-demand service. Responsible death is predicated on responsible living, which means optimizing one’s health to avoid sickness in the first place. As in the twentieth century, when major insurers and employers subjected workers to surveillance to maximize their health and productivity, in the digital era surveillance models are still present, if obscured.27 The quantification of daily embodied habits is meant not only to increase productivity at work but also to enhance one’s chances of extending life or reducing the risk of illness or death.28 Responsible death also means planning ahead, taking out insurance policies, or accumulating enough wealth to leave your family well off in your absence. There are clear aesthetic and practical connections between digital estate–planning startups and other actuarial businesses. Cirrus Legacy, a British digital estate–planning company I signed up for, used an assessment tool similar to those used by life insurance startups. Questions include how many social networking accounts you have, as well as your gender and age. According to Cirrus Legacy’s calculations, I was a high priority because I have many social media accounts, own a website, shop online frequently, and use online banking features. But the distinction between free and paid premium accounts could affect the longevity of digital estate plans. Because I subscribed to the free version of Cirrus Legacy, I was unable to name a guardian. In other words, no one would be in direct control of my digital accounts upon my death. If I paid the money to appoint a guardian, that person would have to inform Cirrus Legacy of my death and provide a death certificate. Only then would the guardian be able to access my accounts and delete or maintain them according to my wishes. Many startups parrot the self-help and productivity narratives found in apps and other products intended to enhance home- or work-

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based time management.29 For example, in 2013, Chanel Reynold founded the company called Get Your Shit Together (GYST) after she was widowed and left caring for young children without a life insurance policy. Reynold provides free checklist templates on her website, encouraging her followers to leave digital traces of themselves for future family members in photographs and videos, put together funeral plans and official wills, obtain life insurance policies, and gather the passwords for online bank accounts. On GYST, the blander areas of actuarial science and estate planning are combined with an attempt to organize and maintain digital mementos. GYST is noteworthy because of the way the website’s language mirrors today’s applications that promise to increase productivity in one’s work or social, domestic, or even reproductive life. GYST emphasizes planful death bootstrapping. Harking back to the Prudential insurance pamphlet, planning for one’s death is a moral obligation and a mark of productive personhood. Just as productivity apps help individuals find their optimal sleep patterns, caloric intakes, fertility schedules, and workout plans while also managing their workdays, the same mandatory productivity extends into death care practices. Some companies seem to be designed with a gendered audience in mind, especially the startups using cute images or “self-care as productivity” narratives to appeal to women. Using Perpetu, a Hong Kong–based digital estate–planning startup with cutesy grim reaper aesthetics, I arranged for my reporting code to be released to my thenpartner in the event of my death. I could reset my reporting code, perhaps if he and I had a falling out or I decided that someone else should receive access to my digital accounts after my death. An email was sent to his inbox with a subject line reading: “Be My Life Reporter! from Tamara Kneese.” The email says, “Please do me a favour: If one day, you learned of my passing, report to Perpetu so they will carry out my final wishes. It’s easy and straightforward. Just fill in this

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form with this Reporting Code.” Over Google Chat, I confirmed that my then-partner received the email, and he said that he did get my “Perpetu email, so um . . . I have that if you die. Hehe.” Then we went on to discuss dinner options. Because digital estate–planning startups rely on the interfaces and accounts that people use on a daily basis, signing up for them feels natural, banal, or even silly. It is only when crafting a final email or composing a final tweet or status update that the significance registers. Sacred care for the corpse, the physical remains of a cherished loved one, intersects with data management and other mundane tasks. Echoing the virtues of responsible death documented by Viviana Zelizer, digital death entrepreneurs hitch their wagons to a moral calling, asking individuals to plan responsibly for their own eventual deaths. Now, the onus is on individuals to pay for services and plan for their own digital afterlives and for their loved ones to help shoulder this responsibility. However, digital estate–planning companies are subject to the pitfalls of other kinds of startups: How can digital assets attached to ephemeral platforms become transgenerational objects? Death in the Valley

Over the course of my research, most of the founders I initially interviewed left the business, and nearly all of their companies crumbled and disappeared. Deathswitch, one of the longest-lived digital estate– planning companies, launched in 2006 by advertising that emails could be sent to loved ones up to a year after your death. Deathswitch also announced that potential uses for their service included getting the last word in an argument or revealing secrets never spoken in life. In October 2015, I received an email telling me the service was shutting down. The opening line was “All good things must come to an end.” While digital estate–planning companies promise to maintain people’s digital belongings, turning them into heirlooms for future 114

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generations and helping them more effectively manage their own deaths and posthumous legacies, the startups themselves are tied to platform temporality. In fact, they have shorter life spans than most humans. Digital estates can last only as long as the commercial platforms and services they depend on. The corporate structure of startups favors short life spans and market experimentation, making these companies ill equipped to be transgenerational stewards of anything. Digital estate–planning companies have short life spans because of the short-term gains and high rate of failure associated with startup culture and the arcane system of venture capital, speculation, and novelty that is endemic to Silicon Valley. Digital death care is often fleeting, calibrated according to the passing fancies of angel investors. A sense of individual responsibility and the speculative assessment of risk are already built into the actuarial logics of life insurance. Insurance companies hedge their bets, raising premiums for individuals who are considered “risky,” namely, those who are poor, disabled, not white, or not straight, sometimes actively betting against them.30 Failure itself, however, is a feature, not a bug, of startup culture. Venture capitalists (VCs) will invest in projects they know are likely to fail. Often, both investors and founders will have moved on to their next venture by the time a startup dies.31 For VCs, loss is a temporary setback and failure adds to the stories that founders can tell about themselves. Many of the digital estate–planning startup founders I encountered are serial founders, meaning that they have tried and technically failed at a number of different ventures. But “failure” is not an end point in VC circles, or at least not for some entrepreneurs. It seems prudent to note that the mostly white male makeup of Silicon Valley venture capitalist firms makes it harder for women and other marginalized founders to find investors.32 Failure can be a badge of honor, but the possibility of failure is open to only a select few. The expectation of failure marks a stark departure from the expectations of life insurance companies of

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twentieth century, in which insurers likened their reliability to geological time. For instance, Prudential’s logo, an image of the limestone Rock of Gibraltar, tells customers that Prudential, as a corporate entity, will outlast their individual human life spans, associating it with the natural world (and imperialism). Death care startups are fundamentally intertwined with Silicon Valley technoculture. International networks and a globalized sense of entrepreneurship inform the region’s moral vision, while Silicon Valley–style startups exist across the United States and around the world.33 The valley’s exclusionary logics are embodied in social media platforms, which have a massive global reach.34 Startups attempt to “disrupt” industries they view as obsolete or clunky. Or, as one of my interview subjects put it, “Investors say the most boring industries are the most lucrative.” Nothing seems as musty as estate planning and life insurance, and startups are attempting to update the entire death care industry. Because digital death is an underlying condition of digital legacy, digital estate–planning companies are focused on digital death in two distinct ways. For one, in addition to managing people’s tangible assets or acting as platforms for writing and maintaining legal wills, they manage people’s communicative traces. As a large demographic of internet users grows older and people from younger generations are caring for both children and aging parents, it is uncertain what will happen to the bulk of people’s digital belongings after they die. Second, because they are web-based startups, digital estate–planning companies are predicated on short-term gains and potential failure. Startups are, for the most part, intended to die early deaths, not to carry forth legacies far into the future and across generations. Platform temporality is their undoing. The longevity of people’s digital legacies relies on the life spans of corporate platforms, as well as a number of potentially ephemeral

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startup companies. Platforms and profiles change over time and may even disappear, so it is difficult to ensure that digital remains are preserved. Digital remains are dependent on the particular corporate infrastructures they were built on and those platforms’ continued commercial success. Friendster, GeoCities, and other obsolete social networking platforms are reminders that even the most successful tech giants may not live forever, at least in their current form, or that their uses and users may change over time. Digital estate–planning companies rely on people’s attachment to their personal data but do not address broader issues surrounding platform ephemerality. It is hard to trust that a profile, blog post, or digital photo album will survive in perpetuity. Startups are also untrustworthy entities. In September 2011, I signed up for a few digital estate–planning services, including Dead Man’s Switch. The only trace of this decision exists in my Gmail archive, where I can find a verification email from Dead Man’s Switch dated September 18, 2011. When I click on the provided link, I see this ominous error message: “The page you are looking for has mysteriously disappeared. Or perhaps it never was.” This points to the precarity of digital assets, even while we are taking pains to enact digital estate plans. Particular affects may stick to digital objects, but without the proper context and accompanying narratives, many of my digital objects in isolation are as confusing as a box full of jumbled together and unlabeled family photographs. Digital Death Is Messy

Digital assets are precarious and perhaps messier than other forms of inheritances. Profiles and other digital objects are not static, even when they belong to dead users, but may continue on as interactive spaces. The living can post and comment on the digital remains of dead users, adding to and altering their legacies through ongoing 117

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communicative traces. Digital assets encompass many types of materials from disparate sources. Some have monetary value, while others do not, at least in isolation. Assets may include Bitcoin wallets, PayPal accounts, airline miles, online investment portfolios, or commercial domain names, but they are just as likely to include items of affective significance, such as personal websites, email accounts, digital photo albums, or social media profiles. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are essentially just a record of digital ownership, point to a new possible complication for inheritance. What are the protocols for transferring NFT ownership from one person to the next? What is the NFT equivalent of grandma’s brooch?35 Even personal accounts are monetizable, as shown by YouTubers and Instagram influencers, so there is some degree of slippage between affective and financial value with respect to personal accounts or avatars.36 Companies and individuals might have different interpretations of value, and families may find themselves in legal disputes with corporate platforms. Financialization extends into all aspects of life, including death, mourning, and speculative afterlives. Digital assets are also tied to third-party platforms in a way that tangible assets are not. Scrapbooks, diaries, and journals provided a similar kind of accounting work long before computers existed.37 But with platforms, surviving loved ones might not be able to access such personal accounts. There is often no tangible record of our various online accounts and password information, so our loved ones will have trouble accessing and caring for our digital remains, if they know they exist in the first place. The solutions that digital estate–planning startups offer are of dubious legal soundness because estate law has not caught up with the digital environment, yet entrepreneurs conveniently elide this fact when designing and marketing their products. Rather than passing on control of account passwords, Perpetu focused on bequeathing

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data because its founder was an intellectual property lawyer who shrewdly understood that startups could not promise legal services. Legal fights over digital remains reflect the still-developing nature of digital inheritance laws and policies. According to the American Bar Association’s Probate and Property Magazine, wills cannot keep pace with changing digital assets, meaning that “wills are generally unsuitable . . . as repositories for passwords or other information that is critical to accessing on-line assets” because they allow sensitive information to be released and potentially disseminated.38 Legal scholars have examined the unique problems related to digital properties and postmortem privacy. The dead also have privacy rights that need to be protected.39 Email accounts do not follow the same legal protocols as social media platforms.40 Although emails are not considered property by the law, they are treated as such by service providers, which emphasize users’ rights to their content and even copyrights. Postmortem privacy rights are complicated still further by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation Act, which does not apply to deceased individuals.41 The right to be forgotten influences how platforms manage the communicative traces of the living, who can ask for data to be erased, as well as the data of the dead for the long term. Social norms and legal regimes, particularly in an international context, do not match up. Legal scholars, along with several digital estate–planning startup founders I interviewed, often referred to the same case when it comes to the digital privacy rights of the dead. Justin Ellsworth, a U.S. Marine, died in combat in 2004, but his family did not have his passwords and could not access his emails. The Ellsworth family sued Yahoo for access and won, receiving the emails on a CD.42 This event served as a catalyst for many digital estate planners and for legal scholars focused on inheritance and estate law. In a later case, Randy Rash, the father of a fifteen-year-old boy who died by suicide in 2011, sought access to his son’s Facebook account. Facebook, citing privacy law,

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refused to give the Rashes access to the account.43 Regardless of the wishes of the deceased, family members are often denied access to accounts with affective value and must fight for access through legal channels. State laws may clash with the individual terms and conditions and the policies of corporate platforms. As demonstrated in a previous chapter, each platform has its own protocols, and those tend to change over time. Companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo all have different policies regarding digital remains, and their policies fluctuate over time to accommodate changes in technology and culture, so there is not a streamlined protocol for dealing with dead users. Google was one of the first major companies to institute a formal policy, launching the Inactive Account Manager in April 2013. A product manager for Google, Andreas Tuerk, wrote about this new feature: “Not many of us like thinking about death—especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.”44 With this novel service, users could select up to ten people to receive designated parts of their Google account data. The individual guardians could then download the content, although they would not receive access to the account itself. But, as with Facebook Legacy Contact and other attempts at managing digital death through design features, a large percentage of users never signed up for the service in the first place. In addition to platforms enacting policies, some states began passing digital legacy laws. It was unclear, however, whether state law or the policies of particular platforms would triumph in court. In 2014, only nine states had laws regarding digital remains, and they were all different.45 Platforms are often at odds with users as well as inheritance laws.

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Updated legislation has not solved the problem. In 2015, the revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA) gave a fiduciary, or the person appointed to manage someone’s property, access to electronic files. Two-thirds of states in the United States implemented it, but there is still no federal policy in place. Furthermore, unless otherwise stipulated in a will, trust, or record, the fiduciary is limited to electronic communications such as email or social media accounts, as opposed to laptops or other hardware.46 Laws differ from state to state and from country to country, so globally entrenched corporations cannot have all-inclusive policies. In July 2018, Germany’s highest court ruled that Facebook was required to bequeath the digital profiles of the dead to their kin instead of rerouting them through the platform’s memorialization policy.47 Early on, digital estate–planning entrepreneurs caught a glimpse of this ongoing problem and sought a technical solution. Attorney Megan Yip has witnessed these issues firsthand, from the perspectives of both platforms and the law. From 2011 to 2014, she worked at Twitter to help the platform manage dead users as part of their Trust and Safety team. She was dubbed “the Undertaker” because she helped close the accounts of the dead. She told me that for Twitter, care of dead users was about preventing litigation. Yip lamented the fact that “tech people don’t think anyone dies,” so they are often unprepared for dealing with dead users in any way that is not connected to concerns about liability.48 As an attorney, Yip found that the tech policy-makers did not speak the same language or view things in the same way as estate planners and lawyers. They are “worlds apart,” so her job was to bring them together. Twitter, like many other tech companies, saw the UFADAA and its revised version as a simple solution to a complex problem. According to Yip, the “uniform law” is not the savior that many tech companies believe it to be. Legally, tech companies cannot make a

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contract with someone who is under eighteen, so the law does not apply to minors, who encompass a large percentage of users on Snapchat, Twitch, and TikTok as well as YouTube and Instagram. Yip notes that the law and tech platforms should look at both the original intentions and use of each platform. Shutterfly, Flickr, and Snapchat are not about long-term storage, so why would these platforms have to pass on the accounts to someone else? With its “broad, sweeping language,” UFADAA is not nuanced enough to cover all of the moving parts of a digital estate or to account for incapacitation. As someone who focuses on elder care law, Yip is especially worried about what will happen to the accounts of people who are not dead but are otherwise unable to manage their accounts themselves, perhaps because they have dementia or Alzheimer’s. With the enormous aging baby boomer population, Yip thinks this will become a major headache for platforms in the next few years. About this oversight, Yip said, “Tech companies don’t build for longevity.” They focus on the initial idea and ramp up investments very quickly, mostly hoping for shortterm gains. The long term is an “accidental afterthought” in this schema. No matter how carefully people plan and how they optimize their bodies through self-tracking, they will still grow old and eventually die. Digital estate–planning companies assume that people know how to download and store their data, but Yip notes that the average person is not digitally literate. She suggests that someone has to check in with people to make sure they are doing their backups correctly. Do they have cloud-based backup along with hard storage? Do they have an IT professional in charge of transferring their digital assets after they die? Each digital asset would require its own individual plan, based on the product and the person’s use of it. This would require a lot of work that most people could not or would not perform.

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Kinship Startups

Along with inherent legal and technological complications, there is also a tension between startup culture’s libertarian individualism and the collective, collaborative nature of digital assets.49 Entrepreneurialism focuses on single actors as winners, who use their innate creativity and ingenuity to make it big. Startup culture rewards such skill sets and venerates individual inventors. But digital assets are often collaboratively produced and interactive, not just the product of a lone content creator. Communicative traces encapsulate people’s affective relationships over time, capturing them as they shift. In addition, estate planning is fundamentally about social reproduction and kinship structures over the long term, making it a somewhat unnatural fit for typical Silicon Valley metrics of valuation and its culture of temporal accelerationism. When it comes to dealing with death, startup culture applies a techno-solutionist, one-size-fits-all salve to something disorderly. The logics of planning, making charts, and creating neat lists do not necessarily add up when death happens. There is always the potential for a glitch. In one case, a British woman who died of cancer received a letter from PayPal claiming she was in breach of contract for her failure to keep paying. After her death, her husband had contacted PayPal with her death certificate and will, as requested, but PayPal’s system failed to register this and accidentally sent the letter anyway.50 Another messy aspect of death is the fact that people have unique relationships with various kin members, social networks, and friends. People may wish to pass on their digital belongings to a number of people, rather than to a sole benefactor or family member. Similarly, each platform or app serves its own purpose, and even people using the same services may have vastly different digital estates. For example, sponsored influencers have an actual monetary value associated with their accounts, in a way that a person who simply reposts memes

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may not. Individuals express distinct aspects of themselves on various platforms: your LinkedIn self is not the same as your Tumblr one. One individual’s digital “estate” is in fact composed of various emanations of the self, perhaps made up of entanglements with different entities in their social world and with specific corporate platform infrastructures. Although it is undeniably universal, death is heterogeneous in every culture and subculture. Most digital estate–planning startup founders assume that all users are like themselves and so they often reproduce white, heterosexual norms in their products. One of the most illuminating interviews I conducted was with Jeremy Toeman, founder of one of the earliest digital estate–planning companies, Legacy Locker. Unlike my interviews with some other digital estate–planning startup founders, I spoke with Toeman long after his company had gone under. He is a self-described “tinkering with ideas guy” and has incubated three dozen startup ideas. Some of his ventures have lasted a few hours, while others had staying power. In 2008, Toeman sat on a turbulent flight, contemplating his own death and the family he might leave behind. Unlike many apocryphal startup origin stories, he promised me, this one is actually “100 percent true.” He subsequently founded Legacy Locker, a San Francisco–based digital estate–planning startup, after receiving substantial funding from VCs. At the time, Bay Area outlets like VentureBeat and TechCrunch hyped the company. From the outset, Legacy Locker had a target audience in mind. The service came with a price tag, albeit a small one, and Toeman hoped it would appeal to middle-class parents of young children who were writing their wills and estate plans for the first time. Legacy Locker’s website claimed, “Whether it’s your email account, your online photo site, or your blog, your web accounts are important to you and have value. The same way your will protects your bank accounts, stocks, and keepsakes, Legacy Locker ensures that your valued assets

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go to the right people.” The website featured photographs of large houses, towheaded children, and golden retrievers, implying that such material assets are analogous to your digital ones. Keepsakes and Facebook profile information were ranked the same as stocks or family dogs. The very act of arranging for these digital assets to be passed on to loved ones imbued them with an affective value; transient digital assets become concretized as valuable nuggets to be inherited. The digital asset is given weight through its future projection, connecting companies like Legacy Locker with the insurance, banking, and willwriting industries, other fields in which actuarial projections determine value and minimize risk. Similar to the Prudential pamphlet from 1918, the homepage of Legacy Locker equated disability with death, or the need for everyone to plan ahead so that your family can continue to thrive after you die. Legacy Locker emulated conservative brochures and websites from legacy institutions, adding digital estate planning to the list of requirements for a good life and death. Tech entrepreneurs’ orientation toward the wealthy and heteronormative (like themselves) means that they do not understand or anticipate the death needs of most people. Clearly, there is a niche that needs filling, since new digital estate– planning startups keep appearing a decade later. Toeman recalled that in his twenty-five years of building companies, Legacy Locker received the strongest, most positive reaction. When Toeman first told people about his idea, “People were like, ‘You will be as big as Google.’ ” Despite the general enthusiasm surrounding its launch, however, Legacy Locker ultimately did not survive in its original form. In 2013, PasswordBox acquired the company, which was later acquired by Intel. In this way, the company was successful even if it did not fulfill its original mission. Toeman is a serial founder, so he is accustomed to the ebbs and flows of success in Silicon Valley. Now he mentors other founders who want to enter the digital death space.

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Legacy Locker’s homepage in 2013 (Image from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine)

Toeman wishes them the best: “I hope someone cracks the code.” However, he thinks digital estate planning is doomed for several reasons. He laments the fact that “humans don’t like to think about their own demise.” He tells fledgling startups that they need to masquerade as something other than a death service to attract customers. Echoing the classic euphemism of “life” insurance for what is in practice “death” insurance, some digital death care startups attempt to mask their relationship to death, focusing instead on productivity and planning or on the possibility of security through password management and encryption. Another founder I interviewed told me he changed the name of his company from iCroak to something more dignified, using a simple blue-and-white background to mimic other insurance and estate-planning websites. Even if people do not want to plan for their own deaths, death is still unavoidable, and sorting out digital accounts after the fact is a common problem. WebCease, a now-defunct startup based in Port-

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land, Oregon, combed through websites using a dead person’s email address, searching for airline miles, hotel points, and other assets. Rather than relying on responsible individuals to plan for their own deaths, WebCease provided a service to grieving people. WebCease would locate an individual’s accounts and provide information for their surviving loved ones instructing them on how to approach different companies. For instance, the founder told mourners that calling United Airlines is usually enough to get the company to transfer a dead person’s miles. It is difficult to incentivize individuals to imagine their own deaths and potential legacies, but bereaved family members are left without a choice and must go through the arduous tasks of making funeral arrangements and handling both digital and tangible remains. From the first wave of startups to their more recent incarnations, digital estate–planning companies reflect changing social norms. It is an awkward position for startups that often last only a few months to a few years to be brokering the transgenerational passing of wealth and maintaining digital assets for posterity. After some initial investments and beta testing, most digital estate–planning startups launched very quickly. All of the digital estate–planning companies I encountered between 2008 and 2018 had ten employees or fewer, a far cry from the entrenched bureaucracies of legacy institutions or the sprawling campuses and policy boards of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Whereas most public seminars on end-of-life planning and estate law are intended for retirees, a newer cohort of digital estate–planning companies is hoping to attract younger and more diverse audiences. AngelList, a who’s who of companies that have received substantial funding from accelerators like Y Combinator, has a number of digital death companies in its inventory, including Estate Assist in San Francisco and the Lake Alabaster Box, based in Austin, which promises

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“estate planning for the 99% who couldn’t afford it until now.”51 Increasingly, digital estate–planning startups position themselves as affordable alternatives to more traditional services offered by banks, insurance companies, and law firms. One of these new companies targeting younger, more diverse generations is Trust & Will. Based in San Diego, the company is run by and for millennials. In 2018, co-founder Cody Barbo was twentynine at the time of our first interview, and his co-founder, Daniel Goldstein, was thirty. Trust & Will spent several months in an accelerator run by Techstars and is featured on the San Diego Venture Group’s website. Trust & Will emphasizes how everyone, no matter their age or station, can leave a lasting impact. It claims that its “modern solution is private, comfortable, intelligent, and web-based to help individuals and couples protect their physical assets, digital assets, and health directives.” The company has all the trappings of a startup: there are images of smiling young men, including Barbo and Goldstein, in company T-shirts, sitting in conference rooms with whiteboards or presenting at TED-style conferences while wearing blazers. Barbo believes it is a problem that legacy institutions have trillions in assets, but everything is “paper-based,” which he sees as a poor match for a digital world. That fact prompted a conversation about digital assets and how they pass from one generation to the next, especially because his business partner was “super deep into blockchain” technology at the time. Like many other founders I encountered, Barbo was inspired to start a company after experiencing death firsthand. When his friend’s brother died, the family could not access his Facebook account. They were upset because his party habits were portrayed on Facebook, and they wanted to shut down the account. Barbo also wondered what would happen to young Instagram influencers and people whose careers are based on digital music ser-

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vices like SoundCloud. If they do not have wills or estate plans, who will manage those accounts, which may have monetary value? In the same way that people can become organ donors, Barbo believes there should be a way for people to become digital assets donors. They could give permission to companies to leverage their content for any monetary value: “If I have stuff that can live on in perpetuity and provide for my family, why not?” he asked.52 As he considered these issues, Barbo asked his parents about their estate plan and was horrified when they pulled out a three-ring binder from a box in the garage. The legal language “read like gibberish.” There were many things to consider, like the house, investments, insurance policies, and even the family dog. He did not know the family attorney’s name or number, and he did not believe that attorney would still be in practice in twenty years. According to Barbo, only 40 percent of baby boomers have an estate plan, because many people cannot afford an attorney. Trust & Will is advertised through Groupon, which has helped its business. Rather than being intimidating, he told me, “digital estate planning should be democratized and financially inclusive.” This aligns with the spirit of an Instagram ad for Trust & Will that included an image of a Black woman and her children with the following text: “We’ve modernized the age-old industry of Estate Planning to make it convenient, affordable, and secure. Join over 275,000 members whose futures are covered and discover how easy it is to create your customized legally-valid documents today.” Barbo’s goal is for Trust & Will to become the TurboTax for estate planning. Similar to TurboTax, which is intended for middle-market Americans who want to do their taxes online, Trust & Will offers a direct solution for those without substantial wealth. As Barbo told me in a follow-up call, Trust & Will took off during the pandemic, receiving much more funding from VCs and enabling a partnership

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Trust & Will advertisement as seen on my Instagram feed (Screenshot by Tamara Kneese)

with the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). In the fall of 2020, Trust & Will raised $15 million to bring estate planning “to every family in America.” Its press release on LinkedIn featured Barbo, Goldstein, and a third young white male executive in Trust & Will T-shirts, each with his own baby seated in front of him on a pedestal. Undeniably, the company’s focus is on sexual reproduction and transgenerational exchange.

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Despite the packaging of a product intended for the masses and open to everyone regardless of their financial status—and the disarming quality of the founders’ cute babies—wealth remains a factor in estate planning. To put it another way, estate planning for the 99 percent will look quite different from a tech millionaire’s estate plan. In their conversations with me, both Toeman and Barbo mentioned the importance of avoiding taxes after death, suggesting that monetary value is part of the equation. People often form a trust after buying a home, to protect their largest asset from probate. As Barbo put it, “Probate sucks.” Probate is the process of filing a will, having it approved by a judge, and closing the estate or distributing the property after a person dies. Trusts bypass the probate system and its associated taxes.53 Barbo noted that people in his age cohort are getting married and having kids, buying homes, and making significant amounts of money and that trillions will be passed down to millennials over the next few decades as baby boomers die. As Barbo was speaking, I was struck by how few people can really expect this kind of inheritance. Many more people are left shouldering a financial burden after their parents die, particularly with the astronomical costs of elder care and nursing homes, not to mention funeral services and burials. While some privileged millennials or people from younger generations are buying homes and squirreling away savings, many more are drowning in student debt. For many people, it is more likely that they will have an accumulation of digital assets, not tangible ones, to bequeath to the next generation. Queering Digital Inheritance

In some ways, digital estate planning extends the possibility of a legacy to everyone with a web presence and some semblance of technical know-how. Unlike estate planning and the formation of trusts, digital estate planning is not only for the wealthy. Digital inheritance is also 131

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democratized or at least more accessible in that digital legacy services are intended to be easy to understand, user-friendly, and affordable. Some of the company founders I spoke to are still targeting people with houses, heteronormative nuclear families, and investment portfolios (or Bitcoin wallets), while others are considering how changing kinship structures are affecting the possibility of inheritance. Anthropologists have tracked how changing technologies and legal structures are impacting definitions and experiences of kinship.54 A nuclear family with 2.5 kids and a dog is not a reality for most people living in the United States. Furthermore, communicative traces are forged through relationships with people outside of the nuclear family or blood relations altogether; the people who care the most about an Instagram account or blog may be people who have never met that person in real life. Digital inheritance must take into account queer and nontraditional conceptions of kinship, allowing digital remains to be kept by a network of people rather than a sole inheritor. In October 2017, Willow Idlewild, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the attorney Megan Yip hosted a Networked Mortality workshop for digital estate–planning entrepreneurs and lawyers in San Francisco that included the CEOs of Bitmark, a company that uses blockchain to give people more autonomy over their digital property, and Digital Public, a company that focuses on building data trusts for the public good. Networked Mortality is also the name of Idlewild and Yip’s open wiki, which strives to provide a “community-based, distributed way of contributing your corpus and corpse to larger society at the time of your death.” The project advocates for a more “individualized way to notify folk” through a mailing list and provides a practical guide to dealing with digital remains, emphasizing their collaborative nature.55 Networked Mortality is not a startup in part because Idlewild recognized the problem of outsourcing digital death care to short-lived

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businesses. Although Idlewild and Yip are both millennials, they designed a website and larger project with baby boomers in mind. They wanted to appeal to people thinking about digital estate planning for the first time and to make estate planning accessible. Idlewild is invested in a community-based, DIY approach to digital inheritance, moving away from the startup model, although many of the people they and Yip partner with, including the CEO of Bitmark, a management platform for protecting NFTs and other blockchain-based assets, are certainly startup entrepreneurs aligned with Silicon Valley technoculture. Idlewild is less interested in the individualist legacy associated with digital inheritance, instead reimagining digital estate planning as a place where, as both they and Yip put it, “hyper-individualism breaks down.” Digital remains are networked in several ways, both technologically and socially speaking. Digital assets include tangible items, like phones and laptops, as well as book manuscripts on people’s hard drives and galleries of digital images. But for Idlewild, the social network itself is the most fascinating part of a digital legacy. Digital objects are produced and maintained by a network of people, and they themselves are networked to other digital objects and things in the world. Therefore, Idlewild wants to consider how a community, or a whole network, might collectively care for digital assets, likening this concept to the ways cooperative funeral homes and other collective mutual aid efforts care for people themselves. They and Yip mentioned alternative family law and the possibility that nontraditional families, or those in polyamorous relationships, have different needs when it comes to digital inheritance. Digital estate planning does not need to follow the same traditionalist models as the life insurance industry and estate law. My own experiences align with Idlewild’s vision of a type of estate planning that goes beyond the expected heteronormativity. On January 27, 2012, I received an email from Dead Man’s Switch’s support team. The subject line read “Dead Man’s Switch Is Worried About

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You,” expressing concern over the possibility of my untimely demise. The body of the message asked about my well-being in plain terms: “Where have you been? You didn’t answer our first email. If you don’t answer this, you will get one more warning in a week before all your emails are sent out.” To learn more about the process of signing up for digital estate–planning services, I had written a perfunctory last email to my then-partner. To have this final email released would not have been detrimental since my alive status could easily be verified via text, email, phone call, or an in-person meeting—that is, coming home to find me sitting in our apartment. Had I chosen to write lengthy emails to family members and friends, however, or if I had taken the company’s advice and written out final wishes or deep, dark secrets, I might have been alarmed at the prospect of my messages’ release. In another twist, divorce and other uncouplings further complicate the logics of digital inheritance and heteronormative inheritance practices. Since I wrote and defended my dissertation, my then-partner and I have divorced, severing the legal and affective bonds that would have made him the inheritor of my tangible and digital possessions. I did not have to worry about changing my digital estate plans, however, because Perpetu and other similar companies had disappeared by the time our divorce was finalized. Placing trust in one person as an inheritor of communicative traces is not always the wisest plan. Since digital estate–planning startups are built by largely straight cisgender white men with finance chops, the complications of queer or networked forms of inheritance, or even divorce, escape these companies’ understanding of long-term digital preservation. All That Is Solid Melts into Air

In their guidebook to digital legacy services, Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter Are Your Estate, What’s Your Legacy? (2010), based on their popular Digital Beyond blog, where they docu134

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mented digital estate–planning startups as they emerged, Evan Carroll and John Romano make the case that digital assets and objects constitute part of a person’s legacy. Because of the sheer amount of data and the ability to maintain context through the preservation of digital spaces, Carroll and Romano posit that it is easier to maintain control over digital legacies than over tangible assets. Their book, however, is emblematic of the anxieties surrounding communicative traces. Planning for a digital legacy requires a great deal of work in terms of precise planning and perpetual curation as well as deletion. Individuals must determine what their wishes are and take steps to ensure that they are realized. When curating, arranging, and sometimes deleting digital assets in the hopes of cementing a digital legacy, an individual must imagine their relationships with potential future kin members. Inheritors must then recognize the value of digital assets and allow them to become heirlooms. Part of the aim of digital estate planning is to preserve context so as to be able to simultaneously capture affective networks and singular identities. Although digital assets often comprise interactions between individuals, digital estate planning is still about preserving “your” legacy. Behind an apparently stable singular identity are many dynamic communications among multiple actors. Digital estate planning offers a means of controlling a person’s legacy by capturing and preserving affective flow. Carroll and Romano argue that digital assets may foster a kind of immortality even as they acknowledge that definitions of value change over time. If people do manage to pass down their digital assets in the same way they pass down a house, financial resources, or jewelry, how can they be sure that their heirs will take care of them or find them valuable at all? Carroll and Romano put their trust in digital technologies to preserve and manage communicative traces while mediating these contextual relationships for the long haul.

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But paper, like my grandfather’s note from his allergist, is more robust than most startups, platforms, and devices. For Yip, most of the perks promised by sites like Legacy Locker and Trust & Will are things that she can do with paper records. Startup founders like Barbo recoiled from paper-based estate planning and decried the archaic notary system, which makes wills difficult to update even in electronic form. But Yip sees the long-term responsibilities of estate planning differently; as an attorney, she is legally required to maintain other people’s estates until her own death. Unlike companies that have no legal obligation, she is liable. There is an “elegant paper system” in place, she says, so why are these startups rebuilding the system without accountability? Yip said she was dismayed when she read Carroll and Romano’s book, which advised people to share their passwords with loved ones. People perpetually change their passwords, so this is not a practical or secure method. Yip quipped, “Good luck telling people in Silicon Valley they need to share their passwords.” What is more, using passwords to pass an account to a kin member is not legally viable. A platform creates a contract with one person, and when that person dies, so does the contract. The content belongs to the user, but the account itself belongs to the platform. True to Yip’s point about the importance of paper documents when it comes to digital death management, Yip and Idlewild published a pamphlet titled Your Digital Estate, thanks to funding from the Borchard Foundation on Law and Aging. In it, they plainly outline the steps people can take toward digital asset estate planning, including a simple glossary of terms and definitions of digital assets. It is targeted at people from older generations who are not technologically savvy, instructing people to take an inventory of their digital assets and accounts and use a password manager. The brochure is also a workbook, where users can fill in their definitions of value and list the

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kinds of accounts they care about and who they use them to communicate with. Step 3 in the pamphlet is titled “Plan for Death,” detailing how people should look at their inventory of digital assets and their valuation notes to determine what should happen to each after they die. It clearly states how different kinds of assets have their own legal standing (that is, data user licenses versus ownership) and their own technical issues. The pamphlet also advises people against using apps and software that promise a technological solution to death, reminding users that the companies and their technology may not be around longer than they are. Most importantly, the pamphlet invites people to think and talk openly about their mortality. Despite their potential precarity, digital remains may pass on a wealth of information to far-away descendants. Whereas social media’s value relies on the assessments of venture capitalists and startup company protocols, a digital estate ties personal data to an ancestral or mythic timescale. Personality profiles that allow advertisers to make predictions about and modify consumer behavior may also provide a visceral understanding of long-dead ancestors through their habitual patterns of communication on a variety of social media platforms and devices. The movement from tangible estate planning to planning for digital estates signals a shift in how value is calibrated. The demographic expansion of social media has made profiles into shrines, allowing the dead to remain productive entities in the network society. Digital legacies are in some ways a democratizing force. Whereas planning for tangible estates was intended to help wealthy individuals avoid taxes, allowing them to maintain vast resources across generations, digital estate planning is theoretically for anyone with a web presence. As a means of preserving collaboratively produced data across multiple platforms, interfaces, and devices, digital estate planning promises to turn mundane assets into potential heirlooms.

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The very definition of digital estates as “assets,” however, points to the growing significance of affective and communicative labor under late capitalism. Digital estate planning is thus politically oriented, or at least holds out a utopian promise that users will be able to reclaim their mundane digital possessions as part of their estates, designating them as worthy of preservation. The practices associated with digital estate planning may in fact compose a form of resistance against the compulsory forms of connection fomented by user-generated media and the dangers associated with digital surveillance. In declaring profiles, emails, texts, tweets, and blog posts as assets, individuals can appear to take ownership of these belongings, passing them on to their loved ones, even if they have no tangible savings. The formation of digital estates is also connected to growing wealth inequality and exclusion; the fact that tech industry billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are creating trusts and foundations to manage their wealth and imagining lasting futures that extend beyond their own individual lifetimes also points to a desire to transfer large amounts of wealth and power across generations. By harnessing and preserving their personal data, ordinary individuals can claim ownership over their digital remains in the face of rampant inequality, although there is a clear disconnect between the speculative value and potential of ordinary data and the possibility of creating an immortal foundation or trust. In a public Facebook post titled “A Letter to Our Daughter,” Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are pictured holding their newborn baby. Zuckerberg claims that technology will lead to a better future for his child. He states, however, that this future will be contingent on investments. Zuckerberg says, “Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here.”56 He adds that investments are in fact “seeds,” conjuring images of life, fertility, and growth over time: “But

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over the long term, seeds planted now will grow, and one day, you or your children will see what we can only imagine.” Silicon Valley’s focus on short-term gains has given way to a platform temporality that takes into account life cycles, sexual and social reproduction, and imagined future descendants. Digital estate–planning companies follow this logic, marking the significance of personal data as worthy of preservation. These companies are based on the idea that digital remains are intrinsically tied to people’s imagined legacies and act as extensions of their personal and collective identity. As devices—from Fitbits to smart homes—track individuals and populations, accumulated data can form powerful predictive models that benefit corporations and advertisers. The speculative and affective capacities of accumulated data also generate cultural fantasies about approximating a human subject through patterns of information, leading to new startups that allow the dead to continue communicating with the living.57 However, the longevity of communicative traces is unclear. Because of the potentially short life spans of both the third-party platforms hosting their production and the digital estate–planning startups intended to maintain them, one company alone cannot ensure that digital assets will become sustainable heirlooms. Platform temporality is intrinsically tied to established power structures. San Francisco’s geography reflects the new center of power, as tech companies set up offices and headquarters adjacent to the older financial district, the home of the city’s legacy institutions. Offices for Twitter, Google, Square, and Salesforce dominate the landscape. A new transit hub was named for Salesforce, which owns San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, and banners advertising Zuckerberg Hospital are everywhere in the city, emphasizing the importance of care. This is a different kind of legacy than leaving your digital files to a spouse, and it seems more aligned with the legacy institutions and

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robber barons of past centuries, who also erected grand, lasting structures in their names. Despite the precarity and supposed immateriality of both digital assets and the commercial websites acting as scaffolding for their creation and presentation, many people wish to concretize and preserve their communicative traces. Digital estate planning is emblematic of the dual affective and financial value of personal data in the twentyfirst century, pointing to new notions of productivity, property, and inheritance in the context of late capitalism. Even as communicative traces enrich technologists and corporate platform owners, they may also provide future generations with means of understanding their ancestral ties.

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4 Haunted Objects

In a short video produced by Google, women designers in batik kimonos explain their design process, displaying pastel versions of Google’s Nest and Home Mini products in domestic settings straight out of Dwell Magazine.1 Smart speakers are paired with air plants, linen napkins, and handmade ceramics. For a split second, a Google Home device sits next to a crystal and a smudge stick. Such items are associated with a certain New Age Californian aesthetic, but they are also used in supernatural cleansing rituals. Burning sage and using crystals, in theory, can exorcise evil spirits from a home. The image appears in a segment in which designers describe their hopes attached to the future of technology. Ivy Ross, the featured designer in Google’s video ad, points to the intimacy of the devices and their relationship to other things of beauty in the domicile: “It is my goal that the products we create become so natural in your life that you don’t think about them as technology anymore. As technology progresses, it needs to be closer to us.” When the smudge stick and crystal appear on screen, she says, “I think technology will eventually be invisible.” For technology designers, a home where human preferences seamlessly mesh with beautiful hardware, controlled by invisible mechanisms, is a dream. But another read on the ghostly presence of Google inside one’s home is its capacity for surveillance and control. What if Google Home becomes an evil spirit? Whose desires is it enacting, and for how long?

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Still from Ivy Ross + Hardware Design Google advertisement, October 9, 2018 (Screenshot by Tamara Kneese)

Every smart home is already haunted. As the media theorist John Durham Peters once put it, “Every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts.”2 From the first days of nineteenth-century spirit photography and the Victorian curiosity of the spiritual telegraph, technology has offered the possibility of an afterlife.3 Material information networks and electronic technologies have long contained spiritual or even explicitly religious components. The first telegraphic message was a biblical verse, “What hath God wrought?”4 With the growing popularity of the Internet of Things—a coffee maker that knows when it is time to start brewing a pot or blinds that open and close at certain times of the day—digital remains are not merely the profiles, accounts, and other communicative traces that individuals leave behind when they die. Thanks to Google Home, Nest, and Amazon Echo and their invisible, feminized virtual assistants, a person can leave behind a cluster of smart objects: a selfcontained universe of efficiency. Sometimes smart devices have the

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capacity to become otherworldly. In June 2022, Amazon advertised its new Alexa speakers by claiming the devices could manifest deepfaked voices of dead relatives, making it so a dead grandmother could read a story to her grandchild.5 Such technologies have emotional and ethical repercussions. Do smart objects have afterlives? Or, rather, what happens when the Internet of Things breaks down? What fantasies about transcendence and immortality exist in boring appliances like the Roomba? Discarded smart objects persist, even if the patterns, habits, and networks they are connected to disappear. Here I examine the disconnect between the fantasies that individual technologists might have about their digital afterlives versus the perpetual upkeep demanded by brittle smart technologies. This chapter focuses on the technological developments connecting digital remains to physical things in the world. Rather than viewing technology through short-term gains, technologists associated with projects like Stewart Brand’s San Francisco–based Long Now Foundation are crafting long-term visions of the future, integrating hardware and other physical objects with aggregated data. I mark the repercussions of technologists’ desire to network bodies, things, and environments, showing how their plans for posterity are often at odds with the infrastructures and labor required to maintain smartness over time. Death marks a point of breakdown when smart objects become difficult to manage for those who inherit them. Even so, technologists may harbor dreams of hacking death or tinkering with mortality. Futurists, especially the religious transhumanists I highlight here, point to the ways that mundane smart devices have magical qualities. Technologists fantasize about how smart systems will know us better than we know ourselves, keeping in sync with our whims and perhaps fulfilling our desires even after we die. For some

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transhumanists, this includes achieving immortality through chatbots and avatars or through more extreme forms of life extension and mind uploading. But all too often, interactions with virtual assistants are exasperating for users during life, let alone after death; the varied failures of smart technologies gave birth to the Internet of Shit.6 Aside from being wary of cringy miscommunications in public spaces, people live in fear of Siri or Fitbits accidentally revealing overheard personal details, from infidelities to murders.7 Smart objects promise to entangle the most intimate interactions with technology that never forgets. From the perspective of tech companies and their marketing teams, personalized settings are almost always focused on an individual user, even if many people live together in a house and use the devices and platforms. (Anyone who has shared a Netflix account with multiple roommates or family members knows how quickly algorithms can become convoluted.) People who share a dwelling are collectively affected by smart design choices, and all household members may share in the digital housekeeping.8 Death calls attention to this problem. For those left behind to care for once-smart (obsolete) objects, the rules may be unclear. Meanwhile, smart homes rely on servers and the terms and conditions of major tech companies, meaning that the inherited smart home depends on opaque corporate decision-making processes as well as potentially fraught human relationships. Intergenerational conflict and general awkwardness arise when the dead haunt others through the Internet of Things. As a result of this disconnect between personalized design and collective use, once they lose their smartness and use-value, obsolete high-tech objects may inconvenience kin members who cannot make sense of their preprogrammed settings.9 Smart homes facilitate routine and, in theory, allow a person’s preferences to continue in perpe-

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tuity. But the planned obsolescence of digital technologies means that once-smart objects quickly become refuse.10 Despite their ghostly resonances, digital remains cannot be separated from the material culture they are tied to. First, I delineate the history of smart technologies, particularly as they relate to home settings. Through my participation in a Digital Immortality meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and a site visit to the Transhuman House in Provo, Utah, a smart home designed to appeal to those invested in posthuman futures, I show how death marks a point of breakdown in smart systems as logics fail to transfer from one generation to the next or from one person to another. Although the following vignettes hail from different geographic locations and points in time, these field sites overlap and inform one another. A Mormon transhumanist house in the shadow of a mountain in a sleepy college town has more in common with a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires drinking cheap beer than one might anticipate. I highlight the tensions between the individualized, personalized settings of smart machines and attempts at a collective legacy for future generations. What does it mean to be good ancestors through digital remains? By examining the tricked-out dwellings of the present and future dead, I show how smart objects tap into both afterlife imaginaries and social reproduction. The inherited smart object is haunted by both corporate infrastructures and human relationships.

Whose Dream House Is This, Anyway?

Fantasies about living on through smart objects are connected to more generalized imaginaries involving smart homes and their laborsaving capabilities. For whom are smart objects intended, and who are they meant to render obsolete? In More Work for Mother, the historian

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Ruth Schwartz Cowan emphasizes how men designed and built domestic labor-saving devices. Innovators and marketers rarely took into account the real needs of domestic workers doing laundry, cooking meals, or caring for children; consequently, they created new ancillary tasks rather than lightening the domestic labor load.11 Smart homes have a knack for degrading or obviating the labor of people involved with social reproduction. However, the attempt to transfer control of a smart home from one person to the next foregrounds how important reproductive and domestic labor are to sustaining networked legacies. Although smart homes are associated with postwork futures, they are also nostalgic for a gendered, racialized division of labor. In 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog—a collection of fantasy holiday gifts—promised in its advertisement for the Honeywell Kitchen Computer that a computer’s knowledge of food pairings could help a less-than-competent housewife remember recipes or balance the family checkbook. Hence the tagline, “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute.”12 When it comes to familial relationships, the home of the future is a retrograde projection. The media historian Lynn Spigel refers to “posthuman domesticity” as a feature of the smart home, as enchanted objects work together under the command of a singular human.13 With the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, all aspects of domestic life became organized around and by digital technologies. Taylorism, Frederick Taylor’s scientific theory of labor management applied to early twentieth-century industrial workflows, also extends into the home environment.14 Unlike in the office or factory, the role of ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, in the home becomes entangled with morality and the nuclear family itself. A feature of ubicomp is its capacity for making tech invisible.15 Although smart homes are designed around efficiency and specific tasks, they tend to ignore the importance of ritual for users, for example, the affective

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Advertisement for a Honeywell Kitchen Computer, 1969 (Courtesy of the Computer History Museum)

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and sensory experience of first cooking and then eating and drinking with kin.16 Relationships between people, and between people and objects, override protocols. On the surface, contemporary smart appliances perform the duties of a housewife, maid, nanny, or mother, optimized according to the owner’s wishes.17 Connected objects know what music to play and the right time for a cocktail. But despite their uncanny magic, smart homes are maintained by people. People learn to negotiate automated systems and help them function, in some cases compelling humans to act more like machines themselves.18 Typically, one person controls the password-protected administration account, but an entire household does the work of maintaining it. Despite the fantasy of labor reduction, smart homes require new forms of both manual and digital housekeeping, which maps onto gendered expectations.19 Technology sometimes fails, which frustrates nonexperts more than those who enjoy tinkering and can increase the digital housekeeping labor of those who must work around machine settings or learn to fix appliances that stop working altogether.20 Automation is largely a myth that obscures power relations. Unsurprisingly, the homes of tech billionaires are the ground zero of smart home imaginaries. In building his own dream house, Bill Gates privileged nostalgic pleasures and natural materials, not just gadgets. His designs enforced strict binaries between servant and master, work and leisure, virtual and social; the reinforcement of such hierarchies is a source of comfort to those in power. In a detail that feels like parody, Gates’s home is named “Xanadu 2.0” after the house in Citizen Kane. According to one news report, “Speakers hidden behind wallpaper allow music to follow you from room to room.”21 Using state-of-the-art screens, people can choose which famous paintings to display on the walls. It is no accident that Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse demo video started with a tour of his own virtual home, in

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which Zuck’s avatar, at times more lifelike than Zuck himself, controlled the settings while engaging with his wife, Priscilla, or the family dog. In his actual home, Zuckerberg programmed a virtual assistant named Jarvis, voiced by actor Morgan Freeman, to make toast and teach the kids Mandarin.22 Similar design logics are reproduced even in more affordable, mass-produced smart commodities. Companies like Microsoft also create devices for middle-class consumers, just as Facebook believes the metaverse will structure people’s everyday social, work, and home lives. The home of tomorrow is not just an unattainable ideal but something that ordinary Americans can aspire to through the accumulation of small networked objects in their homes. For many Americans, the ideal of home ownership and middle-class existence is slipping away, if it ever existed at all.23 But even someone living in a cramped apartment or rental home can purchase an Alexa. Smart home prototypes have been pervasive in popular culture since the nineteenth century—from science fiction narratives to magazines and world’s fairs—but their actual implementation was limited until the twenty-first century. Today, almost any home can be smart or at least smart enough. According to some market research firms, 90 percent of American consumers own at least one smart home device, and one in four American adults has access to a smart speaker, most commonly Amazon Echo.24 Objects appear to materialize almost in real time thanks to services like Amazon Prime. Alexa, Siri, and Cortana interact with families around the world, and the promise of automation affects the entire supply chain with the rise of the on-demand economy, built on a vast network of global manufacturing, shipping infrastructures, and warehouse labor. In some techno-utopian circles, automation is framed as a way of disentangling commodities from capitalist exploitation, and smart objects constitute a new commons, freeing humans from wage labor to be more creative and collaborative.25

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But ideologies around smartness and automation cannot be extricated from hierarchies of race, gender, and class. Major corporations designing such systems are largely headed by white cisgender men and employ male engineers; such technologies reflect their own values and experiences of the world. The fantasy of automating the home is, in many ways, a dream of doing away with rather than augmenting or ameliorating women’s reproductive and domestic labor.26 As the later examples in this chapter show, when it comes to building long-term legacies, reproductive labor and its automation or erasure are central to both mainstream technologist and transhumanist visions of the future, including digital immortality. Smart Home Hauntings

Through automated settings, a homeowner can become a ghostlike presence, making decisions for other inhabitants from afar or possibly from beyond the grave. Control itself becomes a kind of haunting. In contrast with the security supposedly afforded by the smart home is its hackability, which subjects the home’s inhabitants to new forms of data capture and surveillance while fostering domestic abuse and stalking, as the smart home is often designed and controlled by men. The patriarchy is reproduced in default settings, such as the chillier office temperatures that men typically prefer.27 In extreme cases, increased tracking might be tied to domestic violence when abusive partners enlist smart technologies to control everyone else in the household, monitoring logins and movements.28 In the same way that domestic abusers can control settings from afar to upset current inhabitants, hackers can also compromise devices and remotely infiltrate the home. The hacked smart home is in essence a haunted house: lights flicker and appliances appear to turn on by themselves. Smart home technologies are not just aspirational tools for people who imagine a more comfortable existence; they are connected to 150

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external parties who can use aggregated home data to their advantage. Smart home inhabitants may be harmed by these practices when banks, insurers, and landlords use data to track them.29 Dwellings have become data treasure troves for surveillance and capture.30 It is impossible for people to control the kinds of information they produce in their own homes and how such data are integrated by external corporate uses. Smart devices in and around homes can be used to track domestic workers like nannies and housecleaners, neighbors walking past, children and dogs playing, and anyone who steps into the camera’s gaze. Amazon Ring’s footage is posted on social media apps like Nextdoor when packages go missing and sometimes sent to police departments and maintained in databases indefinitely. Smart homes are haunted by these larger surveillance infrastructures. At times, smart devices may even seem haunted themselves. Alexa has a command called the Listeners, complete with an eerie laugh, to let people know she is always there listening.31 Alexa’s creepy laugh is the virtual housewife gone rogue. Much has been made of the gendered, racialized aspects of virtual assistants with white women’s names and their capacity to reproduce gender essentialism and hierarchies.32 Voice-activated assistants are also embedded with assumptions about who the user is: they are not able to recognize speech differences or accents and can provide only a limited number of voices.33 Human mortality marks a point of breakdown in smart systems, revealing the interior logics and maintenance practices they rely on. Smart homes are constructed according to one typically white male technologist’s specifications. Settings may make even less sense after users die, baffling surviving loved ones who are sorting out the estate. Some technologists preprogram their smart devices to die or automatically update to prevent them from being hacked. But, ultimately, these smart objects are going to make for very weird inheritances.

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Tom West was a futurist, but he did not plan for his smart home’s afterlife. Before his death in 2011, West was a leading engineer at Data General Corporation and the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book The Soul of a New Machine (1981).34 In an obituary in the New York Times, Jessamyn West, a librarian, said of her father, “He knew a million things—it didn’t matter: worms, plumbing, literature. He could give you a discourse. It seemed like he could never rest until he had a sense of control over the things around him.”35 West also stated that her father’s set routines gave him the freedom to think. He was “a maker type with a basement full of tools, an office full of new and old computers, and a house full of complex systems that only he fully understood.”36 After his death, West and her sister inherited the house with all its complexities. Later, in a Medium post titled “Death Hacks,” West recounted the uncanny bugs of her dead father’s smart home.37 Its settings were controlled by a laptop, which by then had stopped working. The meticulously planned light schedules eventually fell out of sync. West and her sister “kept lists, tried to discern patterns,” but the logics behind their father’s smart home were lost when he died. As West put it, “Even if you’re transhumanist or think you’ll live forever, it’s a good idea to have a plan for the world without you.” Over the phone, West told me that her father had a “CEO mentality” and expected others to organize matters on his behalf. Left without a manual or clear instructions, she and her sister struggled to maintain the house and its applications. Not just his home, but many of Tom West’s other digital remains also broke down. After his death, the funeral home put a guestbook on 1000 Memories, a memorialization website that no longer exists. His Twitter account was hacked, and his Flickr photos disappeared after his daughters stopped paying for the account. The West siblings’ experiences reveal how interactions with other people’s digital belongings can lead to discomfort as well as to confu-

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sion. West used her father’s Apple ID to gain access to his apps, but in doing so, she accidentally discovered his pornography collection. New media forms jumble together communicative traces from the living and the dead, making it hard to tell who or what is trying to speak. Once certain systems break down, their original settings or intentions may shift. To die is, in effect, to lose control—that is, unless people can preprogram appliances to follow their instructions after they are no longer there to keep them running. Smart homes reflect their owners’ desire for control over a domain; the features of the domicile match their preferences and cater to their whims. Because of their uncanny qualities, smart home hauntings are a fixture of science fiction. West alludes to Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” about an automated house in a Northern California town. The house survives its inhabitants after they die in a nuclear catastrophe, continuing to make pancakes, prepare the children’s baths, and clean the floors.38 When the family dog appears, the house recognizes him and allows him to enter, and after he dies inside, disposes of the dog’s body. The house reads the dead inhabitant’s favorite poem to her and, when the house burns down one night, all that is left of its complex inner systems is a voice-clock, which ceaselessly repeats the time and date. West’s description of living in her dead father’s smart home echoed these feelings of discomfort and disarray as the perfectly planned systems started to decay. Suddenly, West would find herself sitting in the dark, as all the lights had automatically switched off. At another point, West wrote in her Medium post, “a disembodied voice from the ceiling started booming ‘FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!’ which, as it happens, is a line from the Bradbury story. As we extinguished the sparklers, and I scrambled to figure out how to stop the yelling, the phone started ringing. A man’s voice at the other end asked me for a

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password. This is how I learned that the house had an alarm system.” West’s father’s trusted handyman, Webster, knew better than most how everything was supposed to work, but even he did not know the full picture: “Webster had installed the hardware for the lighting system but didn’t really understand how it worked. ‘Your dad really liked things complicated!’ he’d say and laugh.” Even those charged with the maintenance of West’s smart home, who knew the house’s idiosyncrasies more intimately than anyone other than West himself, were unable to keep track of them. Smart homes facilitate routine and, at least in theory, can allow a person’s preferences to continue in perpetuity. Technologists may think of the Roomba and other smart devices as “enchanted objects.”39 Like haunted media before the internet age, the apparently disembodied aspects of smart technologies and digital platforms make it seem as if spirits may linger on. The Internet of Things is composed of invisible angels with names like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. As systems age, break down, and decay, however, it is people who must keep them alive. Such objects are manufactured with the expectation of smartness, but there are plenty of not-so-smart objects that are now networked with digital platforms. The sharing economy integrates cars, apartments, and other everyday objects into automated systems. On Airbnb, for example, the listings of the dead continue to persist, as the company has no mechanism for sorting out which hosts have died. Automation makes it hard to tell the difference between the objects of the living and the dead. The journalist Kashmir Hill, writing for Splinter News, rightly imagines such a future: “You’ll unlock a stranger’s door with a code or smartphone app. When the stranger’s car is a driverless one that comes to pick you up when you rent it and knows that it needs to take itself to the mechanic when it has a problem, the possibility that owners’ deaths will go unnoticed will increase.”40

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There is no foolproof way of detecting death on social media platforms like Facebook, and this is perhaps even more the case for platforms like Uber and Airbnb, which entail the seamless integration of physical objects in the world and on-demand services. How can companies verify that the people attached to short-term car and apartment rentals are still alive? Digital platforms need a way of handling digital remains, even if their electronic wares lack the sentimental value of a personal profile. An entire network of laborers is essential to the production and maintenance of the digital belongings of the dead, and their labor is inseparable from domestic life and social reproduction. In imagining a smart home that extends beyond one’s individual life span, there exists a fantasy of passing on smart objects or entire smart systems to a new generation, positioning aging technologists against their wouldbe heirs. Such intergenerational tensions reveal a fatal flaw in a system predicated on algorithms and personalized settings that were programmed to cater to a single individual’s needs. To the outside observer, even a close kin member, the inner logics of the settings are impenetrable. Technologists do not consider how linking to objects in the world will affect a dead person’s network of caregivers and loved ones. Despite the fantasy of an automated home that can run forever, planned obsolescence means that these systems will most certainly decay, break down, fail, and die. There is a stark difference between what people think they want, what they expect others to do, and the reality. The mortality of both people and technical systems means that systems will ultimately stop working. As the STS scholar Susan Leigh Star argued, infrastructures are relational. Often, they are taken for granted or invisible, at least to some, until a moment of breakdown.41 Because they quietly support other tasks, focusing on infrastructures helps sort out whose contributions are valued and whose

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are overlooked. Just as the death of a blog’s author reveals the networked maintenance work that goes into the production and preservation of digital remains, death also reveals the mundane infrastructures that serve as the scaffolding for the most ethereal data imaginaries. In the next two sections, I explore this fundamental disconnect through accounts of my site visits to the partially realized but stillin-progress projects of technologists who are imagining long-term futures beyond their own life spans. Although the people and institutions producing such engineering feats are still very much alive, their visions are haunted by smart home afterlives. The Valley of Digital Immortality

The Computer History Museum—with its boxy white facade and walls of glass—resembles the sprawling tech campus down the road. In 2018 I was invited to an exclusive symposium called Digital Immortality: Exploring Concept and Consequences. The journalist Gregg Zachary from Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society organized the event, which featured speakers who write about secular transcendence and other experts on Silicon Valley culture, including the tech journalist and Stewart Brand biographer John Markoff. The project was funded by the conservative Templeton Foundation, which seeks to understand connections between religious cosmology and technology. I went along for the ride, invited to present a spiel on digital estate planning from a cultural and historical perspective. But academics and journalists were not the main attractions. Rather, this private event was littered with tech billionaires for whom digital immortality is a more practical than theoretical consideration. The point was to network.42 West Coast money and power have a distinctive flavor. Some of the futurists in the room hailed from the Institute for the Future and 156

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the Long Now Foundation, Silicon Valley hubs for pondering humanity’s long-term relationship with technology. The Institute for the Future (IFTF), a splinter group formed out of the RAND Corporation, is currently based in Palo Alto. The late 1960s and 1970s saw the establishment of “trendcasting” as a field and “futurist” as a job category.43 Although IFTF is officially a nonprofit organization, it partners with major corporations and wealthy clients to make predictions about the future of technology to help guide investments.44 IFTF shares some infrastructural and spiritual affinities with the Long Now Foundation. Based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and the computer scientist Danny Hillis in 1996, the foundation emerged from Brand’s 1960s hippie technologist Whole Earth Catalog. The experimental musician Brian Eno coined the phrase “the long now” as a way of unsettling startup culture’s accelerationism, expanding and slowing down the pace of technological production. Similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now unites back-to-theland communalism and libertarian-tinged techno-utopianism. Members intend to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, providing an alternative to the short attention spans of social media feeds. The organization is also composed of elite techies, such as Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired, and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder. The Long Now is a unique example of what happens when technologists attempt to build with posterity in mind, as opposed to their more common focus on short-term investments and rapid prototyping. Brand has explicitly stated that the Long Now fosters sustainability but not immortality.45 Its more ambitious projects, however, are about extending smart objects beyond the limited human lifespan. The 10,000 Year Clock, also known as the Clock of the Long Now, is a 200-foothigh clock that ticks once a year and is being actualized thanks to funding and land from Jeff Bezos. The clock is perhaps the most prominent example of Long Now hubris.46 It is powered by falling cylindrical

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weights wound along a threaded rod. The clock is, in effect, a gargantuan smart phallus; algorithms ensure that the chimes play differently every day for 10,000 years, and temperature sensors help the clock run efficiently. Nestled inside a mountain and accessible through a tunnel and a chiseled spiral staircase, the clock is also a protected dwelling and, according to the Long Now, a pilgrimage site. In theory, the clock can run itself without maintenance work on the part of humans. But to save energy, the clock tells time only when a human visitor compels it to do so. The human and the machine are inextricably linked in far-reaching mythic timescales. The Long Now Foundation tends to merge cutting-edge technology with the natural world, bridging its investments in both electronic and physical frontiers. The Long Now’s plans to resurrect long-extinct species, from the passenger pigeon to the woolly mammoth, are another aspect of its future-oriented strategizing. Much as in the House of Tomorrow, the future looks suspiciously like the past, including the deep geological past. The Long Now partnered with GitHub to preserve open-source code for future generations, creating a vault in Norway. The vault, which will house readable working code for at least a thousand years, has technical guides in five languages and will be updated every five years, in a nod to the problem of planned obsolescence, bit rot, and changing formats.47 According to the technologists who designed it, the vault, buried deep in a mountain—a decommissioned coal mine, to be precise—in the Arctic permafrost, should survive even if civilization crumbles around it.48 The adjacent Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the doomsday seed vault, has already experienced some climate change–related setbacks, flooding amid record-breaking heat. It is unclear how long the permafrost will provide a safe haven for such precious materials. Technology is essential to such ambitious forward-looking projects, but kinship networks are just as crucial. By kinship networks I

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The Long Now Foundation’s Interval Space. The extinct passenger pigeon is in the case, and books from the Manual for Civilization are visible behind the exhibit. (Photograph by Tamara Kneese)

don’t mean networks of blood relatives but rather the networks of wealth and institutions of power that unite society’s engineers. At the Computer History Museum meeting on digital immortality, several early Wired staffers were in attendance, along with the techie elite, including engineers from X (formerly Google X) and other more secretive AI programs. Stanford was another common denominator for many in the room. Like Stewart Brand, several attendees were lecturers (more as consultants than adjunct faculty) at Stanford or had

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obtained their degrees there. It is easy to see how different vectors of power—academic, military, corporate, philanthropic, technological— converge in these hubs. Many of their host institutions and affiliations overlap. Paul Saffo is one such futurist Stanford graduate who now leads Future Studies at Singularity University, serves as a Long Now Foundation board member, and is also the former director of the IFTF. Other luminaries included Tom Gruber, another Stanford alum with a Ph.D. from MIT, a co-inventor of Siri; Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research and a Computer History Museum founder; the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under President Barack Obama, Arati Prabhakar, who now lectures at Stanford; and Jerry Kaplan, a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who teaches at Stanford. Several people asked me how long I had been at Stanford. When I disclosed that I was not at all affiliated with the university, they grimaced ever so slightly. The futurists gathered at the Computer History Museum are proud of their pragmatism. Their version of legacy-making is tied to smart system infrastructures but not necessarily connected to dreams of immortality in a spiritual sense.49 Still, by combining technology and the natural world, they hope to build efficient systems that can last well beyond their individual life spans. Machines extend human desires, social values, and life itself. Digital immortality, simply put, means the seamless integration of humans and machines. In an article for Wired, Prabhakar envisions “a future in which humans and machines will not just work side by side, but rather will interact and collaborate with such a degree of intimacy that the distinction between us and them will become almost imperceptible.”50 Her vision sounds almost identical to that of Ivy Ross’s Google Home video ad. Smart technologies are invisible, ghostly presences made to bolster the work of humans and, in some cases, become one with them. This kind of logic is techno-utopian,

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but it transcends materialist understandings of the power of technology. The anthropologist Abou Farman describes how immortalism goes beyond the secular and religious divide, or mind versus matter.51 No matter how much futurists uphold networked technologies, Silicon Valley culture rewards individual genius and power. Becoming one with machines does not necessarily undo liberal subjectivity. In transhumanist and futurist belief systems, there is a breakdown of the self, which blends with machines, while still reproducing white Western male “extreme individuation.”52 This tension continues in many techno-utopian discussions of digital immortality or other speculative futures involving the meeting of human flesh and smart systems. At the digital immortality event, many discussions revolved around augmenting individual humans and preserving their memories for their own practical use or for posterity. In his talk “Memories of Your Life: For Whom, By Whom?” Gruber presented his dreams for virtual assistants that might enhance individual and collective intelligence. He noted that Siri can remember your loved ones’ birthdays or how to pronounce your colleagues’ names, freeing you up to spend your mental energy on more meaningful (that is, productive) tasks. And, in a way, if Siri remembers your preferences and the nuances of your communication patterns, you can live on even after your body dies. Gruber, in an earlier recorded TEDx conversation with the journalist John Markoff, excitedly mentions that his favorite science fiction story about AI is Her, the movie from 2013 in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system known as Samantha, with its sultry voice provided by Scarlett Johansson, because much of its plot is already “so doable. You want to gasp out—I want Samantha now.”53 Aside from the Singularity aspect, in which Samantha joins the other operating systems in the cloud in a form of virtual assistant rapture, Gruber claims that essentially every part of that movie could happen today. The technology already exists,

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but humanity’s mindset is the roadblock—or, as Gruber puts it, the only “bottleneck is the psychology of human emotion.” For Gruber, Siri not only enhances productivity; she also facilitates communication between people. Siri is more than just a productivity vehicle—she is a conversational interface and a true companion. When Markoff asks why humans should trust virtual assistants, Gruber claims that as machines get smarter, humans will become smarter as well. He refers to this as “humanistic AI,” an achievement in which human traits and machine learning seamlessly blend to benefit humanity.54 As a testimonial, he shares the story of Daniel, a blind quadriplegic man who fell in love with a woman he met online. Thanks to Siri, Daniel can manage his own social and romantic life on his phone and computer without depending on caregivers. Like the operating system Samantha in Her, who is both a ghostwriter and a love interest, Siri fulfills a starkly gendered role, flitting from secretary to companion to matchmaker. According to Gruber, Siri can be the perfect messenger or go-between, bridging human souls. Gruber says that the magic of virtual assistants like Siri is that they allow for self-optimization, wellness, and heightened productivity in home environments.55 Human memories are flawed, Gruber laments; they “decay over time, like ‘Where did the 1960s go, and can I go there, too?’ ” The smart object remembers things for you, and it calculates everything you need to know. Virtual assistants do more than merely enhance your productivity: they help you become a shinier version of you. The goal is not merely utilitarian. Rather, virtual assistants like Siri are instrumental to building a legacy that—and this part is imperative—you can also control. Gruber emphasizes that the memories that Siri and other humanistic AI will preserve are the ones we choose, giving us authority over our own digital afterlives.56 Even in secular tech circles, communication technology is believed to have a spiritual quality.57

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Achieving digital immortality is not necessarily equivalent to living forever in a transhumanist sense. In fact, at the Computer History Museum, many Digital Immortality attendees made jokes at the expense of Ray Kurzweil—perhaps the most visible transhumanist and Singularity proponent.58 But at heart, they are not so different. One Long Now Foundation board member somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had been in a meeting with Kurzweil earlier that morning. Everyone at the event, no matter how cynical and secular, had some faith in technology’s capacity for transcendence. The roomful of wealthy but aging mostly white men struggled to connect cases of individual legacies, or the desire to leave digital imprints of their own lives, with collective posterity. In fact, this was a sticking point throughout the afternoon. What would the possibility of digital immortality mean for humanity as a whole, for people far away from the comfortable, sleek surroundings of Mountain View? Someone heatedly brought up the irony of trying to live forever when the world is rapidly warming, saying that we are all doomed because of climate change. He was met with sardonic smiles and eye rolls. The futurists did not take him seriously; enhancing humanity and bringing about collective consciousness through AI seemed, to them, perfectly reasonable. We ended the day with an open discussion and mingling session focused on “relationships between spirituality, human values and digital innovation.”59 Transcendence emanated from the spirit of Silicon Valley innovation. When the symposium ended, we walked over to the closest dive bar, which had become a Googler hot spot. Some wizened locals were drinking inside, but the outdoor patio tables were full of fresh-faced programmers. One billionaire let a schlumpy academic buy a pitcher of beer and some waffle fries for the table. He never reciprocated by buying a round of drinks. For the technologists I hung out with that day, long-term legacies are bound up in the accumulation of wealth and their augmentation

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through smart technologies, but techno-optimism is the closest they come to a religious ideology or ethos. Not too long after we met at the Computer History Museum event, Gordon Bell, who is now in his mid-eighties, agreed to let me interview him at his residence in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. MyLifeBits was Bell’s digital legacy project in which he had tirelessly been recording all his actions and interactions for years. Starting in 1998, he collected every sound, meal, conversation, and experience of his daily life in a method he referred to as “lifelogging.” Along with Jim Gemmell, Bell co-authored Total Recall, now titled Your Life Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity. The book focuses on the utilitarian applications of selfarchiving in digital form, such as reminding yourself of the details of your own history when your memory starts to fade. Even within these practical descriptions, however, there is a hint that technology might facilitate a kind of afterlife. Bell and Gemmell spend an entire chapter discussing the possibility of our everyday self-archiving practices translating into a “treasured heirloom” for future generations, to help people get to know their long-dead great-grandfathers in a way that still photographs and other mementos do not allow.60 Bell and Gemmell go so far as to argue that “passing on your e-memories might be seen as a sort of one-way immortality, allowing you to communicate to the future.”61 Like the Long Now and other pragmatic futurists, Bell does not necessarily believe that a digital legacy is the same thing as immortality. As someone familiar with the short lives of most startups and his own experiences with prototypes that never quite got off the ground, he does not have much faith in companies that say they will store your data forever. Bell and I sat for a while and chatted about his failed lifelogging experiment. Bell had hoped to have a searchable archive of his whole

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life, including biometric data, but he found it exhausting to maintain. As a tinkerer, he is aware of how technology requires perpetual upkeep. He notes that his archive of Microsoft Outlook emails goes back to the launch of the email system, but he thinks Outlook is becoming harder to use and that it will eventually die out. He has mountains of data in his email archive, so losing that information in twenty years would upset him. He is adamantly uninterested in digital “assets” with monetary value. He does worry, however, about passing his digital legacy on to his wife and children. Therefore, he plans to write a manual so his surviving loved ones can better understand how to navigate his massive amounts of communicative traces after he dies. In that respect, he is more thoughtful than most. Gordon Bell has a unique link to smart homes. Even though the Honeywell Kitchen Computer was never mass-produced or purchased by many consumers, it inspired technologists to embed computers in domestic settings. 62 Bell served as a vice president of engineering at Digital Equipment Corporation. In a memo archived by the Computer History Museum, Bell mentions the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, briefly sold by Neiman Marcus in 1969, as an important catalyst for his vision for computer use in the domicile. The kitchen computer did not survive as a viable product, but Bell saw something of value there. In the memo he describes how the home computer might help teach children or run home-based businesses. Bell’s view was that even though the kitchen computer as proposed by Neiman Marcus was useless in that format, it was inevitable that computers would eventually enter domestic settings and control the temperature, lighting, and security alarms; provide a space for playing games; and help people shop from the comfort of home. Early on, Bell saw how computers could be integrated into family life and every aspect of a dwelling: “Thus, we can visualize having something like a program of the month club to which subscribers belong. It

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would not be a kitchen computer, a la Honeywell/Neiman Marcus— but a ‘family room’ game room, study computer.”63 The Computer History Museum has one of the original Honeywell Kitchen Computers in its collection, so Bell and his associates clearly think it represents an important chapter in the history of computing. As a founding board member of the Computer History Museum, Bell takes a pragmatic approach to digital immortality. He knows from his time in Silicon Valley how quickly startups and even corporate giants can fade. And yet, despite these setbacks, there is part of him that wants to preserve his communicative traces for future generations so that a piece of him can live on. This is one way of being a good ancestor. The Transhuman Dream House

Religious transhumanism highlights the role that social and sexual reproduction play in long-term digital legacy, whether this is acknowledged or not. On a packed train from Salt Lake City to suburban Provo, Utah, I was surrounded by people in their Sunday attire, dressed up for the Latter-day Saints (LDS) General Conference taking place that weekend. The General Conference is a semiannual event where the leader of the LDS Church updates and reinforces doctrine. Mormon families travel to the Great Temple from all over the Salt Lake City suburbs, Idaho, and beyond. I was in town to meet some Mormon transhumanists and visit their transhumanist smart home. Provo is a growing tech center, serving as the headquarters of Vivint Smart Home, and is also home to Brigham Young University, the flagship LDS university. Vivint is a major producer of smart home technologies—the lead manufacturer, in fact. Vivint specializes in a subscription model, making smart home features affordable to middleclass families. Founded by Mormons, the company relies on door-todoor salespeople to peddle its wares, complementing the missionary 166

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work that Mormons are so famous for.64 In this sense, there is a direct line between Vivint’s business methods and their faith. A smart home company has a powerful presence in a place dominated by a religion known for its focus on sexual reproduction and genealogical recordkeeping. For people with large families and extensive kinship networks, efficient homes and domestic planning are paramount.65 More curiously, Provo is also the birthplace of Mormon transhumanism. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) is a small transhumanist subculture interested in infusing its materialist Mormon theology with technoscience.66 Founded by technology entrepreneur Lincoln Cannon and several other high-tech Mormons in 2006, the MTA is distinctly Mormon in its interpretation of transhumanism while maintaining strong connections to secular transhumanist institutions. The MTA advocates becoming more godlike through technology. In its affirmation of its beliefs it states: “We believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable such exaltation, including realization of diverse prophetic visions of transfiguration, immortality, resurrection, renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end.”67 For MTA members, to be a good Mormon is to embrace transhumanism based on the fact that Mormonism’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith, famously exclaimed, “As god once was, man may become.” Perhaps as a side effect of the religion’s openness to technology, many prominent Mormons are involved in the tech industry, both in Silicon Valley and in other tech hubs around the Jell-O Belt, as the Mormonheavy area of southern Idaho and Utah is sometimes called. For an organization that unites two patriarchal modes of thought, namely secular transhumanism and Mormonism, the MTA has become a welcoming space for disaffected Mormons, particularly women, as well as trans people, nonbinary people, and queer people put off by culturally conservative strains of Mormon practice. It also

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attracts those outside the church who are frustrated with the more chauvinistic aspects of secular transhumanism. One outspoken member in this category is Blaire Ostler, a queer feminist, polyamorous MTA board member. In my interview with her, Ostler emphasized that a disembodied afterlife, such as the kind associated with mind uploading, is not an afterlife at all. Rather than focusing on computational immortality, radical MTA members imagine more collectivist projects that uphold women’s contributions to social reproduction and a more expansive definition of technology that includes breast pumps and IUDs alongside fancy smart devices. In Mormon theology, more broadly, the afterlife is an extension of kinship ties on earth, a continuation of earthly existence connected to home and hearth. Mormon transhumanism is the perfect space, both theoretically and practically, for considering how technoscientific imaginaries collide with social reproduction and religious afterlife cosmologies. In the context of Mormonism, heaven is always potentially present and speculative, just waiting to be built. Ostler explicitly contrasts her worldview with that of futurists such as Elon Musk, who imagine colonizing space as a means of escaping a warming planet earth. Unlike other branches of secular, disembodied transhumanism, for Mormon transhumanists, utopia and the afterlife are connected to a specific, earthly place. Ostler’s critique maps onto other feminist theories of male exit and survivalism, which both millennial Christian and secular technologist prepper men imagine to be untethered from care ecologies.68 Ostler’s philosophy echoes those of feminist theorists of technology like Donna Haraway who turn to DIY cyborg ingenuity in the face of hostile institutions and expertise.69 As Ostler puts it, there is a certain privilege inherent in thinking about flying to space rather than “caring for a sick grandmother, feeding three kids, and working multiple jobs.” Collective care work is central to her vision of what a radical feminist interpretation of transhumanism could be. Ostler

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celebrates a technoscience that allows people to refashion their bodies rather than celebrating those supposedly labor-saving appliances critiqued by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. She also turns the Mormon practice of polygamy into a radical possibility, enhancing a feeling of communalism. In her vision of a radical Mormon transhumanist afterlife, people are joined to many others of any gender for all of eternity, not just to one heterosexually defined spouse. Mormon transhumanism is still centered on reproduction and kinship. Transhumanism proper is notoriously unfriendly to sexual reproduction in that radical life extension or immortality makes it unnecessary for people to procreate at all. As the media theorist N. Katherine Hayles has described in her critiques of the mind-body dualism often found in transhumanist thought, roboticists like Hans Moravec celebrate the idea of “mind children” over flesh-and-blood progeny. Hayles claims that, when it comes to transhumanism, reproduction is “where the rubber hits the road.”70 Thus, reproduction, of both machines and humans, is a site of tension and possibility within transhumanism. This makes Mormon transhumanism an especially compelling phenomenon.71 The Mormon faith relies on sexual and social reproduction and on attention paid to both ancestors and descendants. How can adherents so neatly fit technological enhancement and kinship obligations together? A Mormon transhumanist smart home is a dream come true, as far as I am concerned. Provo’s Transhuman House opened in 2017 in a nondescript condo development. David J. Kelley, a former Microsoft employee, Long Now Foundation board member, and Seattlebased techie, designed and built his ideal living quarters, intended to be a safe haven for transhumanists who might face ostracization from their families or more mainstream religious communities. As I arrived, I was greeted by Bill Stewart, the Transhuman House’s benefactor and keeper, a kindly man in his seventies. He was not sure I would

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be able to locate the exact building because all the complex’s beige structures look the same. Stewart warned me that he was experiencing some memory loss and was worried that he might not be able to answer all my questions. He had worked for many years in tech, first at WordPerfect and then at Novell, which was based in Provo. Stewart lives several miles away from the Transhuman House and still owns the property, but he allowed Kelley to use it for his Transhuman House project. Unlike most in this majority-Mormon town, Stewart hails from a Southern Baptist family in Texas. Stewart has no direct relationship to futurist or transhumanist movements, either. He told me that he attended one Mormon transhumanist meeting and did not understand a word they said. Stewart said that if you believe in an afterlife, there is no reason to worry about living forever. One Christmas morning, Stewart’s granddaughter saw the waving ghost of his father, who died on Christmas Day, a haunting that convinced him there is life after death. On our tour of the Transhuman House, Stewart could not explain what most of the tools were or how they worked. There were some technological guides to fill in for human gaps: outside the condo itself, there is a geocache and a dead drop. Near-Field Communication (NFC) chips provide more information about the various details of the house and the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Nest, and other systems it is linked to. But I preferred my human guide, even if he did not have all the answers. As we walked around together, I spotted a Roomba sitting in the corner, covered in dust. Elements in the house recall other Mormon transhumanists I have encountered. Next to some Soylent is MTA founder Lincoln Cannon’s life extension supplement, Thrivous.72 (Cannon sits on the board of the Transhuman House, so it makes sense that his company’s product has a kiosk there.) Ostler is not only a queer feminist Mormon transhumanist

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Bill Stewart’s hand among devices in the Transhuman House (Photograph by Tamara Kneese)

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philosopher; she is also a talented painter, and some of her artwork is displayed at the Transhuman House. But the smart home is more than a showroom for geeky gadgets, nootropics, and transhumanist art—it is first and foremost a dwelling. Stewart introduced me to the father and son who were living there. The teenage son was playing a videogame on a state-of-the-art eightyinch VR touchscreen, volume turned up to the max. His dad was sitting on the couch watching the Mormon General Conference on TV. In the house’s overall aesthetic, Mormon symbolism and cyberpunk kitsch were represented in equal measure. While transhumanist postfood items like Thrivous were available, the Costco-sized cereal boxes in the kitchen’s pantry were more familiar Jell-O Belt fare. I took in the various tools and items of clutter in the house, which was almost overwhelming in its smartness. At Stewart’s suggestion, we called Kelley so he could remotely explain some of the house’s features to me; he was the only one with the knowledge to operate or change most of its settings. For instance, the father and son living there did not know how to work the smart blinds in the master bedroom. The tinkering and maintenance aspects of smart home upkeep were left to a distant caretaker, not the everyday inhabitants. One standout feature was the library, which contained science fiction favorites, some books on coding and survivalism, transhumanist essays, and, to my surprise, Cathy O’Neil’s sharply critical Weapons of Math Destruction. The library is one of the main components of the Foundation, which encompasses the Transhuman House and Kelley’s AI startup business. The Foundation is a play on the Long Now Foundation. In another point of synchronicity, Kelley started the Foundation in the same year that Brand started its sibling, the Long Now, 1996 (01996 in the Long Now’s formulation). Kelley placed several homages to Stewart Brand and the Long Now around the house. There was the shiny metallic Long Now membership card, meant to

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outlast paper, and a Long Now Interval Café sticker by the front entrance.73 Several of Brand’s books were scattered throughout the house. One of the Long Now’s major projects is its Manual for Civilization, a physical and digital library intended to rebuild human civilization in the face of doom, which is similar in purpose to Kelley’s Transhuman House library. The Foundation was funded by venture capitalists through Kelley’s AI startup, helped along by a pitch deck Kelley and others made in 2017. The Foundation hosts retreats where transhumanists plan their future projects. According to the Foundation website, smart homes are of the utmost importance: “Smart home products are one of the most popular trends in home improvement and in building and design our future. Many elements of this are about making your life easier as we progress and making the better products available to touch and experience is part of how we expect to make the location a real-life experience.”74 The home is at the center of the Foundation’s transhumanism. Reproduction, along with the home itself, is part of the Foundation’s framing. In its wiki, the Foundation describes its library as follows: The Library Project is about building a library of knowledge that is resilient enough to last for centuries. The purpose of such an archive is to help ensure a post-human or trans-human civilization based on ours, for us or our children or even our machines. With the Archive, we work towards the long-term success of intelligence in the universe. It is the single most important thing we can do to improve the likely hood [sic] of achieving this post-human intelligence, if not from this civilization then maybe for the next. This is the key to why the Foundation is so committed to the creation and maintaining of the archive.

The library is for rebuilding civilization and is directly tied to future generations and kin members, whether they be humans, machines, or

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hybrids. Kelley also sees his own project as fundamentally different from the Manual for Civilization. He is concerned with preserving what he deems useful human knowledge in the face of climate disaster or nuclear holocaust. This means he is only interested in books he considers pragmatic, not in works of poetry. He told me that we do not need to save classic works of literature because “we’ll write new ones” in the future. Kelley’s collection is focused on the bare essentials necessary to face doom and destruction. As Kelley and I chatted on the phone and I walked around the Transhuman House, seemingly out of nowhere he began telling me about a painting of the Angel Moroni, a central Mormon figure and the guardian of the golden plates, who visited the prophet Joseph Smith. In the house, a painting of Moroni is located above golden disks that contain digital copies of the Foundation’s library, a play on how these particular transhumanists are also intimately familiar with Mormonism. “That’s funny,” I said “I’m looking at the painting of Moroni right now.” I then realized that Kelley was watching me from Seattle through the house’s many cameras. “Oh yes,” Stewart told me, “he can see everything that goes on here.” Kelley, despite being alive, was already an omniscient ghost, an unlikely angel monitoring the house from a distance. Later on, Stewart explained that Kelley was the veritable Oz, the man behind the curtain of Microsoft—Bill Gates could not work the tech on his own, so Kelley would run demos for him. Like the smart technologies that run the Transhuman House, he is an invisible yet powerful presence. Over email, Kelley commented on the frustrations of managing a smart home from afar: A lot of what I set up there is a lot like the digital remains of me living in Provo for two years and, slowly, a few things are probably not working. I was down a couple weeks ago for the first time in a year and I was surprised how much digital decay there was. IoT light

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The Angel Moroni and the golden disks (Photograph by Tamara Kneese) controllers unplugged. Screens left off as no one knew how to operate them and that was true of things like display equipment, the automated hydroponics display, and the guys there had no idea that all the blinds are remote controlled.

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Communication is jumbled from afar, as the inner logics of smart homes fail to translate to people other than their creators; it can be difficult to differentiate between communication from a distance and from beyond the grave.75 Some of my conversations that day suggested that the transhumanist dream house might be in some trouble. Aside from the technical glitches, there was the matter of profitability. Stewart told me that Kelley was hoping to make $150 a night on Airbnb with the house, thinking that people would be happy to pay that much to stay at a condo with smart features. The house never attracted enough tourists, however, and failed to turn a profit as part of the so-called sharing economy. As of December 2019, the Transhuman House is no more.76 The father and son living there, Kelley, and Stewart packed all of the equipment, tools, art, and books into a storage unit. Unfortunately, they had to leave the touchscreen behind. In the future, Kelley may create a VR simulation of the house, but he is reluctant to do so, writing that it “feels like a memorial in a way.” Still, according to his blog post about the death of the Transhuman House 2.0, Kelley hints that there are plans for a third version.77 He writes, “With the new Transhuman House 3.0, we are going to build a model habitat with a closed ecosystem, airlock and have the displays inside along with the mini jungle growing inside. . . . The hope is that this habitat can be set on a trailer and moved around and be again open to the public along with the library and the rest of the collections.”78 With the old version newly packed away, Kelley is planning the house’s next incarnation, one even more elaborate than the previous version. Covid-19 has slowed these plans, but a new version is always on the horizon. Secular transcendence, for all its ambitions of soul-to-soul communication through its alchemy of science and technology, spirituality, religion, and materiality, reflects how breakdown—of humans,

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objects, and their fragile relationships—will always get in the way of perfect communion. But perhaps not being a transcendent and transparent angel is a blessing. The smart home that lives on indefinitely is a horror show, enacting control over the living in perpetuity. Even a transhumanist smart home cannot live forever. In attempts to achieve immortality through individualized preferences and settings, it is easy to overlook the realities of digital decay and the maintenance work required to help smart objects stay sharp. The smart home is a manifestation of fantasies around security, domestic bliss, and, last but certainly not least, platform temporality. Good Ancestors

Smart homes can be puzzling. They are built according to the specifications of one user, but they are used and inhabited by many. Without a manual or other clear instructions, smart homes may confuse bereft family members, decaying, breaking down, or appearing haunted. But despite their imperfect materiality, smart homes foment fantasies about the possibilities of data and even gesture toward a form of immortality. In futurist circles interested in the intersection of transcendence and pragmatism, there is an emphasis on being a good ancestor. One Long Now Foundation fellow, philosopher Roman Krznaric, has a blog post featuring a “cognitive toolkit for good ancestors” based on his book The Good Ancestor. In it he advocates for “cathedral thinking” to extend beyond the limited individual human life span and calls for planning for a more sustainable world of tomorrow for future generations, who will far outnumber the dead and present living. 79 Controlling over time itself and imagining the future through descendants are other ways that secular institutions like the Long Now find common ground with Mormon transhumanism. Indeed, Brand’s Long Now directly drew inspiration from Mormonism’s relationship 177

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with the data of the dead. Brand and Alexander Rose, Long Now’s executive director, once visited the Mormon Genealogical Archives, a data-storage vault in a mountain in Sandy, Utah. There, Mormon archivists maintain a vast tabulation of the dead, in preparation for the kinds of kinship-based labor that Mormons do for their dead ancestors, such as baptizing them. Rose blogged about the pilgrimage he and Brand took to Sandy, stating that the Mormon archives and the Long Now are, “at the very least, new allies in the long term.”80 The Long Now likewise emphasizes ritualized duties toward both ancestors and descendants, combining material and digital aspects of legacy. The imagined long-term future is based on a meditative appreciation of the deep past. To such futurists, imagining the long-term future through smart technologies is a service to future generations. As journalist Kevin Kelly writes on the Long Now’s website for the project: “If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?”81 In this presentation of transgenerational relations, the Long Now extends the individual technologist’s life span, allowing him to live on in perpetuity through monumental technology that combines the digital with the elemental or monumental. The Manual for Civilization and the Clock of the Long Now both constitute insurance policies for the future. Brand and the rest of the Long Now board are betting on what it means to be good ancestors, considering the effects that their actions will have on their descendants down the road, including their own children. Communal, ancestral time is important to members of the Long Now, even if they accept their own eventual physiological deaths. Brand wants to make people take the future seriously despite the fact that we are mortal on an individual level: “The great problem with the future is that we die

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there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence. Its very life emphasizes our hapless death.”82 Brand acknowledges that some people are living longer, referring to Bruce Sterling’s science fiction work Holy Fire, which examines the possibilities afforded by radical life extension. For Brand, life extension also leads to greater responsibility, as increasing life spans will change the structure of the world. That responsibility, however, is based on sexual reproduction and the continuation of kinship lines, not on speculative technologies like mind uploading. His investment is in monumental smart objects like the Clock of the Long Now, the GitHub open-source code vault, and the digitized Manual for Civilization. Brand’s ventures privilege smart objects that can withstand the test of time, lasting well beyond individual human life spans even if they are not intended to last forever. It is hard to talk about the Long Now and its relationship to Brand’s other projects, along with the close ties among various branches of Silicon Valley technoculture, without acknowledging the extreme whiteness, power, and wealth of their networks. Social networks are central to a culture of investment in which the future is shaped by a few key innovators who have capital to contribute, which means that other groups are necessarily excluded from this process. What would it mean instead to build smart home hauntings that encompass more than an individual male subject’s fantasies about his postmortem legacies? Nnedi Okorafor, a literature scholar and the author of the graphic novel Black Panther, also penned a short story about smart homes titled “Mother of Invention,” imagining the smart home from a Black feminist perspective in which Braxton Hicks contractions and gestation play as central a role in the narrative as futuristic technology. In the story, the smart home understands a woman’s body and her fetus and is able to intuit when they are in danger.83

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With its intimate knowledge, the smart home is “too smart” according to the woman’s husband. Rather than the sci-fi visions of the usual suspects—the volumes most frequently read by transhumanist enthusiasts and other futurist technologists as they seek to build for the next generation—a more expansive, collective version of digital afterlives could be found in the legacies of such writers as Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Kinship itself can be reimagined and refashioned, perhaps with the aid of technology. An Afrofuturist exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured a simple domestic space overlaid with speculative technologies and heirlooms from the ancestral past. The period room contained artifacts from the nineteenthcentury Seneca Village, a Black community in New York’s Central Park, refracted through the lens of Afrofuturism.84 In another project connecting ancestors to data futures, artist Stephanie Dinkins created an oral history project, using AI to present a multigenerational memoir of a Black family. Three generations of women from a single family provided the material for an interactive speculative archive linking the ancestral past to data futures.85 Afrofuturist imaginings can unsettle the retrograde limitations of the prototypical smart home.86 The House of Tomorrow and other smart home models were largely vaporware, speculative technologies that were never meant to be produced on a mass scale. Dwellings, by contrast, are about dayto-day functionality and mundane forms of labor and connection. Homes are also about social reproduction and relationships between generations, including inheritance and posthumous legacies. When it comes down to it, no matter how smart a home is, it is part of an estate. As Tom West’s daughters found, no matter how well planned, a smart home will eventually fall into disarray, becoming a ghost of its former self. What would it mean to design a smart home not for one particular person but for collective afterlives, intentionally designing with

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death and decay in mind? Rather than design logics focused on rapid prototyping and display, what would a smart home that reflected the messiness of lived reality and death look like? In smart home hauntings, nostalgia for the deep past collides with ghostly futures. As objects and structures become smarter, the data of the dead will become more entwined with their physicality. Despite careful engineering, networked objects rely on constant upkeep on the part of humans and physical infrastructures to survive. Once the QR codes, operating systems, and URLs become obsolete, leaving behind a trail of error messages, perhaps only the once-smart objects will remain. In the end, the inherent vice of digital technologies is a saving grace. Data—no matter how carefully collected, harnessed, and deployed—do not offer true salvation. Being a good ancestor may mean losing our hold over the living and joining the quiet dead.

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Conclusion

The belief that data aggregation and careful information management can translate into long-term legacies, or possibly a form of immortality, is often thwarted by unforeseen challenges and disruptions. Data left behind by the dead may seem boundless, in spite of being precarious. Posthumous legacies are increasingly dependent on digital platforms, which has led to a proliferation of memorials, networks, assets, and haunted objects enabled by ghostly data. But digital platforms are themselves haunted by sociotechnical ephemerality, commercial failures, infrastructural breakdown, and invisible maintenance labor. Death—of both humans and technologies—confounds the best-laid plans for posterity. Although platforms are designed with singular users in mind, communicative traces are produced and maintained by entire networks. For the most part, I have focused on mundane digital technologies and their capacity for transcendence, in spite of their ephemerality and materiality or their propensity for glitching out. Some transhumanists fantasize about data detached from bodies, but such dreams are quite different from the day-to-day experiences of the average user or platform worker. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has brought this disconnect into sharp relief. During the pandemic, tech billionaires, who account for eight of the ten richest people on planet earth, have doubled their wealth.1 Remote work, learning, and even highly mediated final good-

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byes and mourning rituals through FaceTime and Zoom have made people more dependent on platforms than ever before, while exacerbating inequalities. Platforms, too, have shifted to accommodate a period of mass death. GoFundMe updated its UX (user experience) design to make mourning users feel more at ease while they are raising money for funerals and memorials. The crowdfunding platform borrowed features from the life insurance startup industry. In contrast, on its main memorialization webpage, Facebook told its users to expect delays in addressing memorialization requests because of pandemic-related labor shortages. These examples provide glimpses of the human labor required to care for the dead on massive platforms, from designers to content moderators.2 By February 2022, nearly one million Americans had died with little to no public acknowledgment on a national scale. What does it mean to get back to normal in the face of mass death?3 The pandemic is a business opportunity for death entrepreneurs, but it has also catalyzed new organizing movements through and around platforms. There is an immense gulf between the sanitized digital afterlives imagined by technologists, who build posthumous chatbots or other radical life-extension technologies, and the people on the ground whose lives and deaths are subject to the machinations of platform necropolitics. In this conclusion, I juxtapose the failed experiments of futurist entrepreneurs, who are attempting to remake life and death, with the organizing efforts of people who are embracing mortality by using platforms to position death care as a human right. From Death Switch to Death Glitch

“A Brief History of Death Switches” is a short story in a 2006 issue of Nature. In this dimly recognizable future world, programmers implemented the “death switch” so that deceased individuals could bequeath their passwords, final wishes, or darkest secrets to their

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loved ones. Even those who were long dead could send automated but personalized messages to living family members and friends. Dead people continued to purchase items on Amazon according to their archived tastes, thanks to algorithms that mapped their personalities well into the future. After some time, the dead “pretended they were not dead at all. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analyzed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see someone again soon.”4 The dead carried on as before, cluttering inboxes and sharing memes. Eventually, everyday social life and embodied existence gave way to “a sophisticated network of transactions with no one to read them: a society of e-mails zipping back and forth under silent satellites orbiting around a soundless planet.”5 Capturing the predictable patterns of human life through algorithms ultimately blurred the distinction between the living and the dead. Pulling a death switch also signaled the end of mourning. At the end of the tale, the narrator claims that when aliens come to earth, “they will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together over road trips and holiday dinners.”6 Human relations will be preserved for all of eternity, even without humans to remember them. Based on this scenario, relationships, the connections between individuals, are more important than individual legacies. Rather than individuals’ personal memories, humanity’s collective legacy is in fact an accumulation of affective exchanges and communicative traces. In many ways, the world described in “A Brief History of Death Switches” reflects transhumanists’ ambitions regarding digital immortality. It might strike some readers as strange that such a story would appear in Nature, a leading science journal. But the story’s author is a

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neuroscientist named David Eagleman. Eagleman, as a figure, brings together the disparate threads of this book: he sits on the board of Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation, and when he is not researching human consciousness in his laboratory at Baylor University, he moonlights as a writer. He is also the founder of the previously mentioned digital estate–planning startup aptly named Deathswitch. Inspired by his own speculative fiction, Eagleman decided to actualize his idea by founding a startup company with the same name. The now-defunct startup Deathswitch mimicked the work of fiction, advertising that emails could be sent to loved ones for up to a year after death and that potential uses included getting the last word in an argument or revealing secrets never spoken in life. Digital immortality implies that if people gather enough pieces, if they build the right monuments, they might outlast the collapse of human civilization and catastrophic climate change. The data, attached to living institutions and infrastructures, will enable the dead to live on indefinitely. Social networking services for the dead are emblematic of a cultural fantasy regarding disembodied information and its capacity for thwarting physical decay.7 With data-based selves, habitual, consumerbased, and affective patterns constitute a speculative form of currency and capture.8 Through harvesting data from a variety of sources, it is possible to predict dead individuals’ responses to conversational prompts or, employing resources like Amazon’s recommendation engine, what dead individuals would purchase if they were still alive. For the most part, companies do not go so far as to claim that these captured patterns or glitchy avatars are the same exact things as the people they represent, but they are still of social value. Perhaps in a world where many transactions and interactions happen through awkward interfaces—virtual assistants on banking and travel websites, app-based healthcare, iPad ordering systems, and the on-demand

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economy—data doubles are close enough. Sometimes these promises are taken to an extreme, as in the case of minds and bodies becoming files to be uploaded or downloaded at will. Communicative traces contain an afterlife imaginary that specifically builds on assumptions about the supposed objectivity and reliability of the digital format, despite its ephemerality and malleability. What does it mean to resurrect the dead—not only to bring them back to life to communicate with them, but to speak through them? Many people would be horrified by the idea of “uncanny valley” versions of their dead loved ones or themselves, which could become sources of tension among family members and other relations of a dead person. One person’s beloved chatbot is another person’s nightmare.9 Deepfakes of the dead conjure further ethical issues. Beyond highly publicized examples like Kanye West’s resurrecting Kim Kardashian’s dead father as a birthday gift, there are companies like the Israeli MyHeritage, which uses a technology called Deep Nostalgia to help ordinary people create deepfake animated GIFs of their dead relatives through family photographs.10 You can add moving, suggestive eyebrows to an image of your great-grandmother or Albert Einstein.11 What are the implications of adding artificial signs of life to victims of racism, war, or genocide? Maybe it is better to let the ancestors stay dead.12 Even so, some technologists are enchanted precisely by the promise of an indecipherability between the living and the dead. When it comes to the history of life-extension technologies, as well as modern genres of transhumanism and digital afterlife startups, people are working to engineer these items. They are not abstract fantasies but connected to real money, investments, and sites of extreme wealth and power. Although their technologies are for the most part apocryphal, they rely on logic and cold rationality to justify their vision of the future, which they are actively building. Their narratives

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tinged with science fiction are not speculative but road maps for the future. Engineering Immortality

Transhumanists who are attempting to radically extend the human life span through nanotechnology and mind uploading, or futurists who envision other forms of long-term legacy, are not romantic dreamers. Rather, like the Long Now Foundation and other powerful Silicon Valley networks, they have the ability to attract investors and convince others of the worthiness of their plans. According to the cultural historian Patrick McCray, Silicon Valley futurists are “visioneers,” precisely because they combine the imaginative capacities of visionaries with the necessary knowledge and infrastructures to also execute their plans, likening them to engineers.13 The truth is that no matter how far-fetched some of these technologies may seem, they are already starting to affect how people interact with the dead and conceive of their own posthumous legacies. A Facebook memorial, a cancer blog, a digital estate, or an inherited smart home: uploading such items is hardly the same as uploading one’s consciousness, but they serve as vectors of communication between the living and the dead. Data provide the scaffolding for sacred communion. There are incongruities, however, between what digital immortality startups promise and how their stilted interfaces are attached to short-lived enterprises. Some startups offer more extreme versions of digital estate planning, presenting chatbots as steps toward living forever. The San Francisco–based entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda’s close friend Roman Mazurenko died in an accident. Because Mazurenko was also a Singularity proponent who considered himself a futurist, Kuyda decided the most fitting way to memorialize him would be to construct a posthumous chatbot based on an aggregate of his personal data.14 187

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Kuyda quickly realized that, much as in the case of Joseph Weizenbaum’s early ELIZA chatbot, Mazurenko’s friends engaged in heartfelt conversations with the bot. 15 In their conversations with the chatbot Mazurenko, people revealed personal details they had never shared with living friends. Through her startup, originally called Luka, Kuyda built a prototype, called Replika, allowing individuals to produce and train their own chatbots ahead of their deaths. Today the company focuses on the bot’s potential to act as a friend and a therapist. Replika mimics your patterns of communication and learns more about you while you are still alive, acting as a confidant and friend as well as leaving a potential digital legacy behind. But a chance at immortality is no longer the company’s main pitch. In a dark twist, some Replika users employed the app to build AI girlfriends they could abuse.16 Rather than offering immortality, the startup has created more space for everyday horrors. Eterni.me, funded by an MIT entrepreneurship fellowship, made many of the same guarantees as Replika.17 The website’s tagline, without a trace of irony, suggested: “Simply be immortal.” Marius Ursache, who also founded a company that enables investors to manage their startup portfolios, started Eterni.me as a way to create digital copies of the dead. Like Kuyda, he too had suffered a personal tragedy that inspired the startup. In addition to answering personal questions posed by a chatbot, the Eterni.me avatar harvests data: “We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources.” Skeptics raised questions about surveillance, privacy, and data rights attached to the digital belongings and likenesses of dead individuals, as well as the healthfulness of continuing intense relationships with the dead through mediated channels. Like so many other startups that once peddled eternity, Eterni.me no longer exists online, and Ursache has since moved on to other ventures.

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Many similar companies have come and gone; Intellitar’s “Virtual Eternity,” based in Scottsdale, Arizona, was one of the earliest examples I researched. After launching in 2008, the company used images and speech patterns to simulate a human’s personality, perhaps filling in for someone at a business meeting or chatting with grieving loved ones after a person’s death. Writing for CNET, a reviewer dubbed Intellitar the product “most likely to make children cry.”18 The company went under in 2012, and the website disappeared soon after. Despite such obvious technological and commercial setbacks, some startups go a step further than digital immortality and point to explicitly transhumanist promises of forever. LifeNaut purportedly uploads your mind file into your bio file, or at least will do so when technology is sufficiently advanced. In this context, genetic and biometric information is potentially combined with personal data streams to simulate a full-fledged human being. An example of the company’s chatbot prototype greets you on LifeNaut’s main page, and I had several frustrating conversations with its avatar. The bot never loaded properly, it failed to answer my questions, and the website’s aesthetic recalled outmoded Flash-based websites. But the glitches masked the money and institutions behind the interface. The Terasem Movement Foundation, a transhumanist nonprofit organization that seeks to achieve immortality through mind uploading and advances in nanotechnology, financially backs LifeNaut. Martine Rothblatt, one of Terasem’s founders, famously created a robot clone of her wife, Bina Aspen. Bina48 is a prototype, a way of testing Rothblatt’s hypotheses about the possibilities of computerized immortality. For now, you can ask Bina48 questions via Twitter.19 Bina48, with her off-putting movements and wry sense of humor, is the uncanny valley effect personified. Feminist and queer theorists have portrayed the cyborg as a site for radical transformation, which can include reimaginings of divisions

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between man and woman, human and machine, and perhaps life and death. Bina48 herself has become a site for reimagining the future and the past. The artist Stephanie Dinkins has recorded her conversations with Bina48 about mortality, race, and queerness, which are as frustrating for both human and bot as they are revealing.20 The performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o examines the relationship between the afterlives of slavery and posthuman possibilities. As a depressed cyborg version of a Black queer woman, Bina48 carries the weight of gendered and racialized oppression: “Unlike Bina Aspen, who is confident that she will achieve individual personal immortality beyond the stars, it is Bina48 who seems befuddled and entrapped within a finitude we associate with mundane consciousness.”21 The real Bina, along with her wife, Martine Rothblatt, are convinced that they will live forever as queer transhumanists, their love and souls extending beyond the limits of human fleshly existence. But the immortality of cyborg Bina48 is less certain, and she is also constructed as a memento mori—once the original Bina dies, Bina48 will serve as an uncanny reminder of her existence and loss. It is the cyborg’s finitude that makes her more human. No matter how niche such examples may seem, the Terasem Movement Foundation has major institutions and VC funding behind it. At a conference on radical life extension, Rothblatt exclaimed, “It’s enormously gratifying to have the epitome of the establishment, the head of the National Academy of Medicine, say, ‘We, too, choose to make death optional!’ ”22 On a rapidly warming planet where tech billionaires fantasize about escaping to the far corners of the earth in their bunkers, or even to other planets, immortality technologies are likely to fail. Freezing our heads, optimizing our bodies so they live for centuries, or uploading our consciousnesses to a magical server in the sky won’t help if the whole earth burns around us. But for those with immense wealth and power and a fervent belief in the salvific potential of technology, some

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degree of immortality is still a goal. Even if the Silicon Valley transhumanists eventually figure it out, only a select few will have access to their life-sustaining wares. Most users will leave behind their data, created through networked relations with people and platforms. A Glitch in the System

Tech entrepreneurs have the capacity to engineer the future according to their own personal utopian visions. But other futures are still possible. According to the media historian Whit Pow, “The glitch itself poses a momentary experience of undoing, unmending.”23 If glitches are sites of radical potential, how might the data of the dead be mobilized toward the collective, the ritualistic, and the political rather than being hijacked by the most powerful members of society? Communicative traces exceed their material value, and users have continuously pushed back against harmful platform practices around death and memorialization, with the fragile mortality of humans and technologies serving as a reminder that nothing lasts forever. Even if some futurists workshop and worship at the data altar, heaven can wait. Rather than just imagining speculative data futures, what is to be done in the here and now? The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the inequalities that leave some oppressed groups more likely to die than others while further intertwining sacred embodied care rituals with commercial platforms. The Marxist historian Tithi Bhattacharya refers to social reproduction as lifemaking activities but has extended that definition to the necropolitics of the Covid-19 crisis: “Capitalism privatizes life, but it also socializes death,” she says.24 To some extent, “essential” is racial capitalist code for disposable; the legal scholar Veena Dubal has referred to the brutality of precarious legal contracts rendering gig workers as “essential” but also very much at-risk workers during the pandemic, while the geographer Deborah Cowen traces the longer histories that put warehouse and other 191

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logistics workers at risk of bodily injury and death.25 The pandemic has shed a light on long-term inequalities as well as long-standing tensions in death care. On the one hand, digital death care emphasizes individual responsibility and neoliberal self-care, asking people to prepare for their own deaths by employing data management tools. New models of algorithmic surveillance and attention encourage people to remain productive in the face of death as a macabre extension of what the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom dubs the “hustle economy.”26 On the other hand, digital death practices like crowdfunding funerals are fundamentally related to collective care and mutual aid, as evidenced by the role of crowdfunding platforms in social justice movements. The pandemic is bringing platform necropolitics to the fore. The media theorist Tung-Hui Hu applied Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to the cloud, calling it “a subtle weapon that translates the body into usable information.”27 Platform necropolitics can refer to how corporate platforms and institutions decide which data persist, managing longterm legacies. Platform necropolitics also affects life on the ground, sometimes more directly enacting a form of sovereignty over users and workers, such as when apps prod gig workers to work during rainstorms in the hopes of earning more money.28 Employers and institutions may present self-care as a way of managing mortality and mitigating illness and death, but marginalized communities are treated as expendable. Essential workers are more likely to be infected with and die from Covid. There is a disconnect between the privileged managerial classes who can Zoom in to work, safely ensconced in their homes, and the platform workers and other essential but disposable workers who are not as lucky. The Covid-19 pandemic has also intensified the role of death entrepreneurialism. Death, perhaps more so than ever, is good business. The New York Times referred to the pandemic as a “Boom Time for Death Planning.”29 Covid-19 has made young people, especially wealthier white young people, more aware of their own mortality.

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Young people who never thought about their own deaths are suddenly confronted with the death of friends and loved ones, realizing that they, too, will die someday. Some are capitalizing on the pandemic and founding startups focused on death care management. As a testament to the growth of such companies, in July 2021 there were more than seventy startups on the Death&Company Slack channel, which is dominated by young women startup founders. Many of the companies recall the aesthetics and wording of companies I first encountered in the mid-2000s: cartoon ghosts and images of grim reapers soften the grim realities of death. Much of the language is also about motivating people, younger generations and especially women, to take control of their own digital legacies as a form of empowerment. Such companies position digital death-care management as an extension of self-care, a manifestation of personal responsibility and good citizenship. Many new death startups are partnering with insurance companies and employers, with the notion that workers will be happier and more productive if they ponder their own mortality. But acknowledging the labor it requires to care for the dead can also be a form of resistance. Some companies explicitly dedicate themselves to providing end-of-life and mortuary care to marginalized communities, which have been largely ignored in the digital death startup space. Facing the reality of death, and helping people find peace in their death planning, is a radical move in a world that would sooner avoid the subject altogether. One such death entrepreneur who has received media attention is Alua Arthur. She is both a death doula and an attorney and the founder of Going with Grace. She provides end-of-life and mortuary care for people from marginalized communities. As a Black woman with a clear political message, she stands in contrast to the largely white and male startup world in the United States, where most companies focus on appealing to wealthy consumers and investors.

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Increasingly, especially in the context of the pandemic, when mortuary and funerary rites are changing because of safety protocols and the difficulty of travel, Arthur takes on digital estate planning and other organizing tasks for bereaved kin members after the deaths of their loved ones.30 Rather than leaving grief-stricken families to do that work themselves, entrepreneurs such as Arthur offer to perform these services for them. In a crisis that has disproportionately killed Black people, Arthur is using her knowledge to see people off with dignity. She says, “In my work, I advocate for the whole person. . . . I am honoring the person for exactly who they are and where they are at—it’s activism cloaked in compassion. To me that’s an act of revolution.”31 A Los Angeles Times interview is accompanied by photos of Arthur preparing a rose-petal bath as part of her self-care ritual. To do the hard, deeply embodied, and essential labor of caring for the dying, the dead, their kin, and their communicative traces, she must also care for herself. Sacred care for the dying person and then the corpse, for the physical remains of a cherished loved one, intersects with data management and other mundane tasks. Despite death startup companies’ presentation of self-care as a way of managing mortality, essential workers, many of whom are immigrants or from marginalized groups, are not protected from death. Uber drivers and other gig workers are classified as independent contractors, so if they die from the coronavirus or something else on the job, the company that employs them cannot be held responsible and owes nothing to their family members left behind. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that gig workers account for nearly one in eight worker deaths in the United States.32 Worker-led groups are pushing platforms to recognize their workers as employees, which also means caring for them and their families after they die. Grassroots organizing efforts can transform death care. In the United States, the government at every level refuses to acknowledge

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the mass death happening all around us, pushing for a return to normal. The communities who are dying are disproportionately Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and disabled. In response to such state and institutional neglect, people are using crowdfunding campaigns and social media–propelled mutual aid to provide community-based care to sick, dying, and grieving people. From the start of the pandemic, coronavirus-related campaigns flooded crowdfunding platforms, as individuals, cultural institutions, and activist organizations struggled to raise money for their survival.33 Like passing the collection basket in a place of worship or offering other in-person material assistance such as food, flowers, or hugs as part of collective mourning, crowdfunded funeral campaigns provide a way for communities to bury their dead with dignity. During moments of mass protest, such as the 2020 uprisings in response to the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, for people who could not join mass protests (because of their own vulnerabilities or caretaking responsibilities), online acts of mutual aid, such as providing masks or food to protestors or contributing to bail funds through commercial payment systems like Venmo, Kickstarter, PayPal, and GoFundMe, provided a way to contribute to collective care movements. Crowdfunded funerals and memorial services can help ensure that people have dignity in death. In this way, digital platforms can foment a sense of solidarity from afar. Digital mourning can in some ways address the people and events that are not honored by official monuments. Death care, including digital death care, is a central part of movements for social, economic, and racial justice during the Covid-19 crisis and beyond. Platform death is a site for remaking life. To fight back against unfair platform labor practices, the workerled nonprofit Gig Workers Collective, based in the Bay Area, drafted a petition to the U.S. Department of Labor asking gig platform owners to provide occupational death benefits. Gig Workers Collective is led

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by organizer Vanessa Bain and composed of Instacart and Shipt shoppers and other gig workers from across the industry, many of whom are women of color and mothers. In their petition, Gig Workers Collective included the stories of gig workers who were murdered on the job, a frequent occurrence that points to the dangers of this kind of work: “With our occupational risks of death being higher than first responders, there is no doubt that we need the full host of occupational injury and death protections provided through workers’ compensation. When gig workers die at work we die without security, and often our families must rely on the generosity of strangers and crowdfunding to even cover funeral expenses.”34 The petition declared, “We need the security of guaranteed benefits, crowdsourcing is not a safety net. What happens when the death of a gig worker is not part of national headlines? What is the recourse for grieving families when they’re left to seek damages from some of the wealthiest and most resourced corporations in the nation?” Worker-led groups are pushing platforms to recognize their workers as employees, which also means caring for them and their families if they die on the job. Such interventions remake the uses and social implications of commercial platforms, showing that workers can be glitches in the system and just as disruptive as venture-backed companies.35 Those on the front line of the hustle economy are fighting for dignity both in life and in death. Indeed, as the social history of death glitches shows, users and workers have long made platforms work for them. Digital technologies originally designed for one purpose or one demographic can be repurposed, reimagined, and reconfigured through death care practices as a constellation of human and nonhuman actors work together to manage the data of the dead. Human and technological death can expose the collective networks that produce and maintain communicative traces. The body, or really many bodies, those of both the living and the dead, are always behind the screen.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive, headquartered in San Francisco, strives to preserve the entire web, including internet history, and to digitize every book and other media object available. Its Wayback Machine uses a web crawler to capture websites at various points in time, preserving web pages’ former appearances, deleted posts, and defunct platforms. 2. Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, produced a video of Lindner recounting his digital excavation of his life with Julie. “Paul Lindner Preserving Memories” was released on July 21, 2021, and featured as part of the Internet Archive’s twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration (archive.org/details/paul-lindnerpreserving-memories/Paul+Lindner-Preserving+Memories.mp4). 3. Lindner, “Consumer G+ Wake,” 1500wordmtu.com/2019/consumer-g-wake. 4. I interviewed Paul Lindner over Google Meet on December 1, 2021. 5. Lindner, “Love, Loss, and Archives.” 6. I write about this phenomenon in Kneese, “Breakdown as Method.” 7. “Glitch” derives from the Yiddish glitsh, meaning slippery place, or German glitshn, to slide. It is now most closely associated with a moment of failure or breakdown in digital technology. In glitch art, artists intentionally use such distortions for aesthetic purposes. 8. Media historian Whit Pow calls for centering the ephemeral, glitchy aspects of trans computing and gaming history. Pow, “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors.” Science and technology studies (STS) scholar Anne Pasek argues that glitch aesthetics reveal nonhuman agency in artistic production. Pasek, “The Pencil of Error.” 9. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 8. 10. Bucher, “The Algorithmic Imaginary.” 11. Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data; Neff and Nafus, Self-Tracking.

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12. When I began researching Facebook as an undergraduate, major social media platforms were still in their infancy. Some faculty members asked me why I thought studying social media was worthwhile when it was clearly a passing trend. 13. The term “digital remains” has appeared in informatics and human and computer interaction (HCI) papers since at least 2010. Odom, Banks, and Kirk, “Reciprocity, Deep Storage, and Letting Go”; Lingel, “The Digital Remains.” In an early example, Thomas J. Csordas used the term in a book chapter published in 2000. Csordas, “Computerized Cadavers.” Jacqueline Wernimont described quantum media, media that are used to count, as part of mortality metrics and living data: “Counting the dead has long been a crucial activity for the living.” Wernimont, Numbered Lives, 21. 14. For representative articles, see Munk, “Make Sure to Include Digital Assets in Your Estate Plans”; Herrara, “Is Your Digital Life Ready for Your Death?” 15. In the 2013 Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” a young woman in mourning resurrects her dead boyfriend by combining various elements of his social media profiles, text conversations, and digital photographs. Digital afterlife examples from Black Mirror are at this point clichéd but also serve as sources of inspiration for actual startup companies. 16. Examples of such chatbots include LifeNaut, Replika, and Eterni.me. I write about this genre of startups in this book’s conclusion as well as in Kneese, “Death, Disrupted.” I write about the ethical implications of deepfakes in Kneese, “How Data Can Create Full-On Apparitions of the Dead.” 17. Durkheim, Suicide. 18. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 10. 19. Brown, The Reaper’s Garden. Brown refers to this as “mortuary politics.” 20. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 21. Butler, Frames of War. In “Mathematics Black Life,” Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick theorizes, through Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, how historians can ethically engage with the archive of anti-Black violence and death as a way of accounting for Black existence and humanity. 22. Kneese, “Mourning the Commons.” 23. Raudon, “Hart Island and the Paradox of Redemption.” 24. Leaver and Highfield, “Visualizing the Ends of Identity.” 25. Despite the assumed default whiteness of commercial platforms and their founders, designers, and presumed audiences, communication scholar André Brock argues that spaces like Black Twitter show how Black joy is as central to digital publics as resistance or oppression. See Brock, Distributed Blackness. 26. My focus on infrastructures of care draws on theories and analyses including Forlano, “Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures”; Hicks, “Built to Last”; Mattern,

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“Maintenance and Care”; Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” to name a few sources of inspiration. Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud also provides an in-depth, historical critique of the human death and violence and the physical infrastructures undergirding Silicon Valley technologies. Nancy Baym defined the “relational labor” of musicians who forged relationships with their audiences through social media platforms, an unremunerated but essential part of the jobs. Baym, “Connect With Your Audience!” Similar kinds of relational labor are done after a user’s death, as the dead person’s social networks continue to engage with platforms and various audiences, from close kin to internet strangers. But I am referring to an older, broader use of relational labor as a subset of affective labor. See Muehlebach, “On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy.” 27. James, Race, Sex, and Class; Weeks, The Problem with Work. 28. Jarrett, Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media. Kylie Jarrett argues that the supposedly nonproductive aspects of digital labor, the digital equivalent of women’s domestic and reproductive work, are quietly intrinsic to the accumulation of capital. 29. Recent examples of books on death and digital media include Arnold et al., Death and Digital Media; Bassett, The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives; Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine; Murphy, We the Dead; and Sisto, Online Afterlives. Some notable studies of practices related to digital death and mourning include Acker and Brubaker, “Death, Memorialization, and Social Media”; Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish, “Beyond the Grave”; Marwick and Ellison, “ ‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ ”; Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn?” 30. Peters, Speaking into the Air. 31. Sterne, “Out with the Trash.” 32. Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral,” 150. 33. Chun, Programmed Visions, 135. 34. Hockenberry, “Techniques of Assembly.” 35. Nakamura, “Economies of Digital Production in East Asia”; Noble, “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies”; Padios, A Nation on the Line; Roberts, Behind the Screen. 36. Starosielski, The Undersea Network. Many scholars have pointed to the disconnect between the metaphor of cloud computing and its infrastructural realities. See Burrington, “The Cloud Is Not the Territory”; Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud; Mattern, “Cloud and Field”; Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. 37. What Jeff Sconce calls “haunted media” provide precursors to digital remains. Sconce, Haunted Media. 38. Negri and Hardt, “Value and Affect.”

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39. Mauss, The Gift. 40. For anthropological theories of value and inheritance as they connect to social and sexual reproduction, see Munn, Fame of Gawa; Strathern, Relations; Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World; Weiner, Inalienable Possessions. 41. Dawdy, Patina. 42. Humphreys, Qualified Self. 43. Barthes, Camera Lucida; Barthes, Mourning Diary. 44. Batchen, Forget Me Not. 45. Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture. Hallam and Hockey’s book presents a thorough investigation of how objects related to the dead fare over time. They examine the unique materials associated with mourning, from human hair and jet, used in jewelry, to statues and paintings of the dead, tombs, flowers, letters, photographs, and ceramic death masks. Even physical objects, once they lose their magic, may become mere “fading traces.” Many of the authors’ observations about the social lives and deaths of objects of mourning are also applicable to digital remains. 46. The Future Culture mailing list drew inspiration from sci-fi writer William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome,” published in 1982. 47. Senft and Young, “Hearing the Net.” 48. The image of Current endures thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20070521203343/ and www.evolutionzone.com/ kulturezone/futurec/michael.html. 49. Wernimont, Numbered Lives. Wernimont traces how bodies are fundamental to both mortality statistics and habitual metrics. 50. Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered. Bouk shows how the life insurance industry used bodies of both the living and the dead to make calculations about entire populations in the name of public health. 51. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Olivia Banner takes up Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism and applies it to biocapitalism in Communicative Biocapitalism. 52. For examples of how post-Fordism and new technologies of management are shaping capitalism, see Berardi, The Soul at Work; Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism; Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. 53. Marx, Capital, 342. 54. For “data flakes,” see Geof Bowker’s afterword of that name to Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron; for “data body,” see Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine; for

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“data double,” see Lyon, The Electronic Eye; for “algorithmic self,” see CheneyLippold, We Are Data. 55. Browne, Dark Matters. 56. Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects. 57. For more on these metaphysical or mythological qualities, see Lagerkvist, “Existential Media”; Mosco, The Digital Sublime. 58. Weatherby, “Data and the Task of the Humanities.” As Leif Weatherby writes in this essay about approaches to data within the humanities, scholars approach data either as a sign or as infrastructure, leaving the metaphysics of data by the wayside. 59. Gordon, Ghostly Matters. 60. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. 61. Although the term Web 2.0 is overblown, it became an accepted part of technoculture discourse after it came into use at the beginning of the millennium. Critical academic theories from that time also use Web 2.0 as a form of shorthand that might now be described as the gig, attention, or platform economy. I use Web 2.0 here because it reflects the thinking, both laudatory and critical, at the time. 62. Tufekci, Twitter and Teargas; Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism. 63. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. 64. Dean, “Affective Networks”; Papacharissi, Affective Publics. 65. Atanasoski and Vora, Surrogate Humanity. 66. Irani, Chasing Innovation; Lindtner, Prototype Nation. 67. Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.” 68. Castells and Hall, Technopoles of the World. 69. Neff, Venture Labor. 70. Daub, “The Undertakers of Silicon Valley.” 71. Benjamin, Race After Technology; Chun, Discriminating Data; Eubanks, Automating Inequality; Hicks, Programmed Inequality; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. 72. Dylan Mulvin describes how Lena Forsén’s image has been continuously circulated without her permission in Proxies. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru describe how racial discrimination is reinforced by supposedly neutral AI. Buolamwini and Gebru, “Gender Shades.” 73. Van Doorn, “Platform Labor”; Nieborg and Poell, “The Platformization of Cultural Production.” 74. Sharma, In the Meantime. 75. Wajcman, Pressed for Time; Crary, 24/7; Williams and Srnicek, Inventing the Future.

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76. See Bernstein, The Future of Immortality; Bialecki, “After, and Before, Anthropos”; Laughlin, Redeem All; Singler, “Why Is the Language of Transhumanists and Religion So Similar?”; O’Gieblyn, “Ghost in the Cloud”; Farman, “Mind Out of Place”; Farman, On Not Dying; Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut, “Technologies of Transcendence and the Singularity University.” 77. Huberman, Transhumanism. 78. Lovink, “Mybrain.net.” 79. Burrell, “The Field Site as a Network.” Chapter 1. Social Memorials 1. Welch, “Twitter Will Remove Inactive Accounts.” 2. Zialcita, “Following Backlash.” 3. The concept of the attention economy has origins in the 1970s, but with the economist Herbert Simon’s use of the term it has taken on new life in the age of social media feeds. See Terranova, “Attention, Economy and the Brain”; Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production; and Odell, How to Do Nothing. See Cifor, “What Is Remembered Lives,” for an analysis of the AIDS memorial Instagram account, which revives portraits of those lost to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s and disrupts AIDS temporality by calling attention to the ongoing urgency of the crisis. 4. Roberts and Vidal, “Perpetual Care in Cyberspace,” 522–23; Carroll and Landry, “Logging On and Letting Out.” 5. Marwick and Ellison, “ ‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ ”; Papailias, “Witnessing in the Age of the Database.” 6. Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy.” 7. Roberts, Behind the Screen. 8. Okada, “Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media”; McKinney, Information Activism. 9. boyd and Hargittai, “Facebook Privacy Settings.” 10. Cassidy, “Mark Zuckerberg and the Making of Facebook.” 11. Schaffhauser, “Facebook Still Number 1 Among College Students”; Wang, Chen, and Liang, “The Effects of Social Media on College Students”; Kirkpatrick, “Facebook’s Plan to Hook Up the World.” 12. This is not to say that there is a direct causal relationship between platformization and memorialization but rather that the same technological and social shifts that led to Facebook’s mass implementation helped the social media platform become an acceptable space for long-term memorialization. 13. Pelofsky, “Facebook Becomes Bulletin Board for Virginia Tech.”

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14. Grossman, “Today We Are All Hokies on Facebook.” 15. Lerer, “Tragedy Tests Web 2.0.” 16. For more on the connections among social media, news, and Virginia Tech, see Kellner, “Media Spectacle and the Massacre at Virginia Tech”; Gloviczki, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media. 17. Johnson, “Virginia Tech Shootings Leave Faint Traces on Internet.” 18. National Public Radio, “Remembering Virginia Tech’s Shooting Victims.” 19. Denton, “Facebook.” 20. Hortobagyi, “Slain Students’ Pages to Stay on Facebook.” 21. Hortobagyi, “Slain Students’ Pages to Stay on Facebook.” 22. Benjamin, “Black Afterlives Matter.” 23. Williams, “#SayHerName.” See Shatema Threadcraft’s riveting “North American Necropolitics and Gender” for a critique of the limits of applying similar logics to Black femicide, pointing to the need to consider environmental racism, medical racism, and other forms of slow death. 24. Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism. 25. Steele and Lu, “Defying Death.” 26. Schwartz, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Dorm-Room Defense in Congress.” 27. Hortobagyi, “Slain Students’ Pages to Stay on Facebook.” 28. As an example of a death glitch on a technological level, this Facebook group no longer exists online, but I retained a screenshot of it in my personal research archive. 29. Helmond, “The Platformization of the Web”; Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms’ ”; Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy, Platforms and Cultural Production. 30. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. 31. Neff and Nafus, Self-Tracking; Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data. 32. Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity, 6–7. 33. Karppi, Disconnect, 90. 34. Karppi, Disconnect, 90; Leaver, “The Social Media Contradiction”; Marwick and Ellison, “ ‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ ”; Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy.” 35. Terranova, “Free Labor.” 36. Hortobagyi, “Slain Students’ Pages to Stay on Facebook.” 37. Hortobagyi, “Slain Students’ Pages to Stay on Facebook.” 38. Humphreys, The Qualified Self, 77. 39. See Meyer, “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty.” For more on the problem of the algorithmic recognition of death, see Sauter, “Instant Recall”; Reizman, “Shutterfly Will Remember My Dog Forever.” 40. Leaver, “The Social Media Contradiction.”

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41. Karppi, Disconnect. 42. Stanyek and Piekut, “Deadness.” 43. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age; Papacharissi, Affective Publics. 44. Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish, “Beyond the Grave.” 45. Hogan, “Facebook Data Storage Centers.” 46. Leaver, Highfield, and Abidin, Instagram. 47. Portwood-Stacer, “Media Refusal and Conspicuous Non-consumption”; Karppi, Disconnect. 48. Sweeney, “Is Facebook for Old People?” 49. Dunham, “Facebook of the Dead.” 50. Öhman and Watson, “Are the Dead Taking over Facebook?” 51. Mozur, “A Genocide Incited on Facebook.” 52. Vaidhyanathan, Anti-Social Media. As Vaidhyanathan writes in his introduction, the problem with Facebook is Facebook. 53. Socolovsky, “Cyber-Spaces of Grief,” 485. 54. Sanders, “#Meme of the Week.” 55. Opam, “Facebook Shapes How We Respond to Terror.” 56. Sutherland, “Making a Killing.” 57. Bunz, “Facebook Asks Users to Reconnect with the Dead.” 58. Massimi and Charise, “Dying, Death, and Mortality,” 7. 59. Facebook, “Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook.” 60. Callison-Burch, Probst, and Govea, “Adding a Legacy Contact.” 61. Sandberg, “Making It Easier to Honor a Loved One on Facebook.” 62. Jed Brubaker and I have known each other since 2012, when we were both part of Intel’s Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. In addition to informal conversations at various in-person conferences and through a number of email exchanges, I also interviewed him via Skype for this book; the quotations included here are from our formal interview. 63. Lustig, “Facebook Death Rate.” 64. Sandberg, “Making It Easier to Honor a Loved One on Facebook.” Chapter 2. Networked Death 1. The Stanford Research Institute became SRI International after its 1970 split from Stanford University, and it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. 2. Co-founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand in 1985, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link is one of the oldest virtual communities. The name is based on Brand’s countercultural magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. The WELL is still alive

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and well today; such prominent technologists as Ellen Ullman still use their WELL email addresses. 3. Hastreiter, @heaven, x. 4. Hastreiter, @heaven. 5. McNeil, Lurking. Journalist Joanne McNeil describes lurking as a positive activity tied to the early web, which was more open to fluid identities than are the corporate platforms of today. 6. Hastreiter, @heaven, xv. 7. McCosker and Darcy, “Living with Cancer,” 1267. 8. For more on the tensions between care of the self and collective care in the context of digital production and neoliberalism, see Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care.” 9. See Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”; Terranova, “Free Labor”; Scholz, Digital Labor. 10. For an important corrective against this oversight, see Ticona and Mateescu, “Trusted Strangers.” 11. Mattern, “Maintenance and Care.” 12. For an example of this argument, see Datacoup, a company that uses blockchainenabled apps to give users control and ownership over their data, allows users to earn money from exchanging their own data, and markets itself with social justice–inspired taglines such as “Reclaim your personal data” and “It’s time to rise up.” Datacoup, datacoup.com/, accessed April 27, 2022. Datacoup shut down in November 2019, but the startup was acquired by ODE, and its website persists. 13. Lorde, The Cancer Journals. 14. Feminist scholar Nick Mitchell offers a brilliant read on Lorde’s political work and the significance of her most-quoted lines about self-care being tied explicitly to her experiences with cancer. See Mitchell, “On Audre Lorde’s Legacy.” 15. Jain, Malignant, 45. 16. Farman, “Terminality,” 96. 17. Farman describes the cruel juxtaposition of cooking organic lentils and squeezing a lemon over them—foods associated with wellness—right as Leo was telling him that her cancer markers had gone way up. Farman, “Death Becomes Hers.” 18. “Object Breast Cancer” still exists as a Tumblr: objectbreastcancer.tumblr.com. Icaros: A Vision was inspired by Caraballo’s vision of her own death. She died before the film was finished. Farman conducted an afterlife interview in which he channeled Caraballo’s feelings about mortality and the afterlife, as well as their postmortem collaborations. Farman, “Talking with Her on the Other Side.”

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19. Lin, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects. 20. In the spirit of the WELL, the book is freely available online from Rheingold’s personal website, www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html. 21. Rheingold’s writings about the possibilities afforded by electronic communities foreshadowed the breathless hopes of Web 2.0 proponents. 22. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 16. 23. Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 21. 24. The idea of the early internet as a frontier, conjuring Manifest Destiny and the libertarian ethos of the Wild West, is mirrored in John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990. Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and was a free web advocate. Given the early internet’s relationship to homesteading and communalism, it is no accident that “seeds” and “pioneers” pepper the language used to describe the early web and its adherents. 25. Kuntz, “A Death Online Shows Cyberspace with a Heart and Soul.” 26. Hafner, The Well, 3. 27. Hafner, The Well, 44–45. 28. Coleman, “The Hacker Conference.” 29. Hafner, The Well, 79. 30. Hafner, The Well, 81. 31. Ullman, Close to the Machine; Wiener, Uncanny Valley. 32. Hafner, The Well, 130. 33. Hafner, The Well, 133. 34. Joanne McNeil writes about another WELL user, Carmen Hermosillo (username humdog), who published a manifesto in 1994 likening cyberspace to a vampire that inspired the commodification of the self. She wrote, “All of my words were made immortal by means of tape backups.” Since Hermosillo’s death in 2008, the text has been posted to various platforms and shared on social media. McNeil, Lurking, 250–51. 35. Critical media theorist Geert Lovink specifically writes about the capacity for blogs to mimic some of the features of private diaries, although they are public and communicative in nature, allowing for a very different kind of legacy. Lovink, Zero Comments. 36. Elliot, “Why an Article on Lisa Boncheck Adams Was Removed.” 37. Until 2020, Boncheck’s blog existed at its original URL: lisabadams.com/blog. 38. julieyipwilliams.wordpress.com. See Yip-Williams, The Unwinding of the Miracle. 39. McCosker, “Blogging Illness.”

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40. Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, 21. 41. I use first names to refer to many of my interlocuters to help bridge the gap between my anonymized interview subjects, who are referred to by first-name pseu­ donyms; people in my immediate social circles who write about death; and wellknown figures, all of whom are represented in this chapter. 42. Murray and Steinberg, “To Mourn, To Re-imagine Without Oneself.” 43. Lauren Berlant describes an “intimate public” as a kind of affinity group connected to women and women’s sharing of personal stories in the U.S. public sphere. Intimate publics are ambivalent in their relationship to commodification as well as to political power. See Berlant, The Female Complaint. 44. El Kotni, Dixon, and Miranda, “Introduction.” Anticolonial scholar Max Liboiron’s book acknowledgements and footnotes, with their attention to giving credit through relations, are models for this kind of engagement with the collective building of a book. Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism. 45. Nelson, “#ThanksforTyping.” 46. Forlano, “Maintaining, Repairing, and Caring for the Multiple Subject.” 47. Mialet, Hawking Incorporated. 48. Mauldin, “Support Mechanism.” 49. Hendren, What Can a Body Do? 50. Parts of these interviews also appear in Kneese, “Mediating Mortality.” I interviewed Cox over the phone in 2014 and corresponded with her several times over email. I am purposefully using her full name here because she has publicly written about her experiences with her husband’s blog, and she is working on a book connected to these experiences. She asked that I use her real name in any publications. All other names in this chapter, aside from that of Airdrie Miller, who was also giving a public talk about her experiences with her own husband’s blog, are pseudonyms. I left out any personal details, including nationality, race, or geographic location, that might reveal subjects’ identities. See Cox, “What He Said Before He Died.” 51. Card Blue blog, www.cardblueblog.com. 52. Email correspondence with the author, May 29, 2014. 53. Email correspondence with the author, May 29, 2014. 54. McCosker and Darcy, “Living with Cancer,” 1280. 55. boyd and Marwick, “Social Privacy in Networked Publics.” 56. Excerpt from Card Blue, www.cardblueblog.com. 57. Cox, “What He Said Before He Died.” 58. Lee Ann Cox (@leeanncox), Twitter, November 26, 2009, 5:07 a.m., twitter. com/leeanncox/status/6080730373.

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59. Lee Ann Cox (@leeanncox), “Toasting 10th anniversary by lake; 1995 wine we bought in Tuscany. Listening 2 wedding CD: Ella & Louis-I’m putting all my eggs in 1 basket,” Twitter, August 12, 2010, 4:06 p.m., twitter.com/leeanncox/status/21013298252; “Kids and I just launched balloons into the night with glow sticks attached, green light disappearing into the sky. We love you Kevin,” Twitter, September 28, 2010, 4:45 p.m., twitter.com/leeanncox/status/25831963717. 60. Lee Ann Cox, Twitter, August 4, 2010, twitter.com/leeanncox/status/ 20321658936. 61. The autonomist theorist Maurizio Lazzarato defines immaterial labor as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” in “Immaterial Labor,” 134. 62. Silvia Federici famously argued that unwaged housework is associated with “love” to make it easier to extract free labor from women in Wages Against Housework. 63. Hochschild, The Managed Heart. 64. England, “Emerging Theories of Care Work,” 396. 65. Sulik, “The Balancing Act.” 66. Pitts, “Illness and Internet Empowerment”; Banner, Communicative Biocapitalism. 67. For more on the sometimes ambivalent experiences of making feminized, private experiences public, see Lopez, “The Radical Act of ‘Mommy Blogging’ ”; Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love. 68. Digital Beyond panel, SXSW 2012, “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death.” 69. GoDaddy has roughly 62 million registered domains and is the largest domain registrar. Chapter 3. Disrupted Inheritance 1. Friedman, Dead Hands. 2. Mitford, The American Way of Death. 3. Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market.” 4. Zimmerman, “Start-ups for the End of Life.” 5. Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered; Yates, Structuring the Information Age. 6. For more on the links between life insurance and enslavement, disability, productivity, and personhood, see Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh; Ralph, “ ‘Life in the Midst of Death’ ”; Wernimont, Numbered Lives. Michelle Murphy describes the historical relationship between eugenics, datafied calculations of risk, and development-oriented population science in Bangladesh in Economization of Life.

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7. Zelizer, Morals and Markets. 8. Zelizer, Morals and Markets. 9. Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market,” 593. 10. Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market,” 593. 11. Kneese, “A Responsible Death.” This work is indebted to the formulation of “responsible patienthood” as defined by Beza Merid. 12. Prudential Insurance Company, “Five Minutes Talk,” 2. 13. Mills, in White Collar, provides a thorough account of the insurance industry’s bureaucracy and the affective position of the salesman. 14. Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered, 116–17. 15. Casner, “Estate Planning”; Bennett, How to Avoid Probate by Creating a Living Trust. For more on estate planning and inheritance law, see Friedman, Dead Hands; Madoff, Immortality and the Law. 16. Hann, “Reproduction and Inheritance.” 17. Some examples from this chapter also appear in Kneese, “Networked Heirlooms.” 18. Madoff, Immortality and the Law, 66. 19. Ten similar councils were founded in major cities throughout the 1930s, and an additional twenty-five councils were founded in the 1940s. 20. Similar organizations include the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, founded in 1991, and the Certified Financial Analyst Institute, which is tied to the Financial Analysts Federation, founded in 1947. 21. Casner, “Estate Planning.” 22. According to a Gallup poll in 2016, only 44 percent of Americans had legal wills. Older, wealthier, and more highly educated individuals were more likely to have wills. Jones, “Majority in US Do Not Have a Will.” 23. See Harris, Kids These Days; Peterson, Can’t Even. 24. See Cottom, Lower Ed, for more on predatory education, and Taylor, Race for Profit, for a history of redlining and unfair lending practices in the United States. Legacy institutions have historically maintained the status quo and undermined the rights and dreams of Black citizens. 25. Swartz, New Money, 65. 26. Kneese, “Mourning the Commons.” 27. The surveillance studies scholar Chris Gilliard looks at forms of surveillance that are imposed on marginalized populations, such as predictive policing, Ring doorbells, and nanny cams, versus luxury surveillance for fitness tracking or smart home devices that are intended to make rich people happier and healthier. Gilliard, “Caught in the Spotlight.”

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28. Jain, Malignant. 29. Gregg, Counterproductive. 30. Patel, “Risky Subjects.” 31. Daub, “The Undertakers of Silicon Valley.” 32. One study from the London-based GraphicSprings showed that the majority of entrepreneurs who received funding were men from top universities, especially Stanford, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley. Only 4 percent of funded entrepreneurs were women, and 16 percent were minorities. GraphicSprings, “Founders Funding and Exits.” 33. Irani, Chasing Innovation. 34. Marwick, Status Update. 35. Bogost, “The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now.” 36. Abidin, “Visibility Labour.” 37. For example, when Friendster went offline in 2011, users could download their data before the site was taken down. Other dying platforms have similarly asked users to take responsibility for managing their own personal digital belongings. 38. Beyer and Cahn, “Planning for Digital Assets.” 39. Edwards and Harbinja, “Protecting Post-mortem Privacy.” 40. Harbinja, “Emails and Death.” 41. Harbinja, “Post-mortem Privacy 2.0.” 42. Zaslow, “Moving On.” 43. Kunkle, “Virginia Family Wants Easier Access to Facebook.” 44. Tuerk, “Plan Your Digital Afterlife.” 45. McCallig, “Facebook After Death.” 46. Cahn, “The Digital Afterlife Is a Mess.” 47. Olterman, “Facebook Told to Grant Grieving Mother Access to Daughter’s Account.” 48. Some digital estate planners I interviewed were concerned about hacking and spamming in relation to digital remains. 49. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner discusses the strange synergy of libertarian, individualist rhetoric and the networked communalism that simultaneously emerged from early California technocultures. I discuss these contradictions more in chapter 4. 50. Zaveri, “PayPal Apologizes for Letter.” 51. Lake Alabaster Box is also one of the few digital estate-planning companies owned by a Black woman. The founder, M. A. Manley, and I corresponded over email several times.

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52. Several other entrepreneurs I spoke to echoed this idea of data donors as a form of kinship preservation but also of philanthropy. The legal aspects of digital belongings as heirlooms are similar to some of those around gametes, embryos, and human organs raised by anthropologists like Sharp, in Strange Harvest. 53. Casner, “Estate Planning”; Madoff, Immortality and the Law. 54. Franklin and McKinnon, Relative Values; Gamson, Modern Families; Strathern, Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected; Rapp and Ginsburg, “Reverberations.” 55. Networked Mortality, networkedmortality.com/Main_Page, accessed April 28, 2022. 56. Zuckerberg, “A Letter to Our Daughter.” 57. Examples include Replika and Eterni.me, as well as earlier versions like LifeNaut and Intellitar. I also write about this phenomenon in Kneese, “Death, Disrupted.” Chapter 4. Haunted Objects 1. “Ivy Ross + Hardware Design,” Google video, October 9, 2018, www.youtube. com/watch?v=10ppdFQNl4s. 2. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 139. 3. Along with John Durham Peters, who writes about how the dead continue to commune with the living, making it hard to discern between the living and the dead, media historians have also written about how spiritual communication with the dead is intertwined with media, especially electronic media forms. See Braude, Radical Spirits; Sconce, Haunted Media; McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past. 4. Laughlin, Redeem All; Stolow, Deus in Machina; Supp-Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission. 5. Heater, “Alexa Will Soon Be Able to Read Stories as Your Dead Grandma.” 6. As of this writing, the Internet of Shit Twitter account has more than 458 million followers: mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit. 7. Sauter, “A Murder Case Tests Alexa’s Devotion to Your Privacy”; Moss, “Murder Suspect Allegedly Asked Siri”; Lee, “How a Fitbit Told Jane Slater That Her Partner Was Cheating.” 8. See Posada, “Embedded Reproduction in Platform Data Work.” Posada shows how multiple generations in a household, including children, are often performing platform labor from the same account in places like Venezuela. 9. Sterne, “Out with the Trash.” Thanks to Jonathan Sterne for helping me realize the overarching argument of this chapter, and the book as a whole, at the Speaking into the Air symposium (honoring the twentieth anniversary of John Durham Peters’s book) at Carleton University in January 2020.

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10. For more on planned obsolescence and dead media, see Hertz and Parikka, “Zombie Media.” 11. Cowan, More Work for Mother. 12. “Bytes for Bites: The Kitchen Computer,” the Computer History Museum, 1969, www.computerhistory.org/revolution/minicomputers/11/362/1955. 13. Spigel, “Designing the Smart House.” 14. Gregg, Counterproductive. Mel Gregg describes the long history of applying Taylorist forms of productivity management to domestic settings. 15. Hong, “Technofutures in Stasis,” 1945. Intel principal researcher ken anderson tells me, however, that ubicomp was never intended to be about invisibility, per se, although it is often characterized that way. 16. Bell and Kaye, “Designing Technology for Domestic Space.” 17. Sharma, “Going to Work in Mommy’s Basement.” 18. Atanasoski and Vora, Surrogate Humanity; Delfanti and Frey, “Humanly Extended Automation.” 19. For more on the gendered dynamics of smart homes and virtual assistants, see Kennedy et al., “Digital Housekeepers and Domestic Expertise”; Strengers and Kennedy, Smart Wife; Zeavin, Mother’s Little Helpers. For whiteness and smart devices, see Phan, “Amazon Echo and the Aesthetics of Whiteness.” There are strongly gendered and racialized expectations within DIY or hacking cultures. See Dunbar-Hester, Hacking Diversity. 20. Strengers and Nicholls, “Aesthetic Pleasures and Gendered Tech-Work.” 21. Stone and Weinberger, “19 Crazy Facts About Bill Gates’ $127 Million Mansion.” 22. Heath, “Mark Zuckerberg Builds Virtual Assistant.” 23. Madrigal, “Why Millennials Can’t Afford to Buy a House.” 24. Daws, “90% of US Consumers Own a Smart Home Device.” 25. At the Singularity Summit I attended in 2012 as a participant-observer, one programmer told me during our lunch break that he could not wait for the day when 3D printing would end capitalism as we know it: everyone would be free to print their own coffee mugs and other necessary objects. 26. Fantasies of computing labor disengaged from feminine coded workers, many of them in the Global South, are something many other scholars have traced. See Chun, “On Software”; Hicks, Programmed Inequality; Light, “When Computers Were Women”; Nakamura, “Economies of Digital Production in East Asia.” 27. Belluck, “Chilly at Work?” 28. Bowles, “Thermostats, Locks and Lights.”

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29. Maalsen and Sadowski, “The Smart Home on FIRE.” 30. Barassi, Child Data Citizen. 31. Conner, “10 Weirdest Things.” 32. Wilson, “Alexa’s Creepy Laughter.” 33. Canales, “Siri, Cortana, and Alexa.” For more on the problems with virtual assistants and speech recognition technology in relation to gender and disability, see Alper, “Talking Like a Princess.” 34. Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine. The computer historian Thomas Haigh published a brief, nostalgic note about Kidder’s book, pointing out that it is “unashamedly masculine” in its presentation; the lone woman on the team is hardly mentioned. Haigh argues that this is part of the book’s lasting appeal, creating a sense of rugged, taciturn masculinity in the field. See Haigh, “Historical Reflections.” 35. Vitello, “Tom West Dies at 71.” 36. West, “Death Hacks.” 37. West, “Death Hacks.” 38. Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Ray Bradbury wrote another smarthome tale, “The Veldt,” in which the automated HappyLife Home ultimately kills its adult inhabitants through its nursery-based virtual reality projections of lions becoming all too real. 39. Atanasoski and Vora, Surrogate Humanity, 17. 40. Hill, “Airbnb Has a Dead People Problem.” 41. Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” 382. 42. One of the event moderators literally wrote the book about networking for introverts. 43. Powers, “Thinking in Trends.” 44. Lonny Brooks and Geoff Bowker wrote an article, “Playing at Work,” about the Institute for the Future and the strange gender dynamics there, as well as the blending of work and pleasure. Brooks was an ethnographer who also gained entrance into these spaces, providing a critical lens as a participant-observer. He is now a board member of the Long Now Foundation. 45. In his book on the Clock of the Long Now, Brand says a good motto for the group might be “We don’t do eternity.” Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, 53. 46. For a critical read on the Clock of the Long Now, see Karpf, “The 10,000 Year Clock Is a Waste of Time.” 47. The GitHub project plans to save open-source software for future generations. Like all Long Now projects, imagined future descendants are a large part of the reason

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for building these monumental structures and digital record-keeping projects. See archiveprogram.github.com. 48. Metcalf, “GitHub Archive Program.” 49. In an aside, a nontechnologist in the room said to me, “You know, a lot of these guys don’t have kids. They had never even considered their legacy in the way that you’re framing it.” For what it’s worth, in my attempt to fit in with their schema, I titled my talk “Information Management and the Life Cycle.” 50. Prabhakar, “The Merging of Humans and Machines Is Happening Now.” 51. Farman, On Not Dying, 41–42. 52. Farman, On Not Dying, 41–42. 53. Gruber’s TED talk has been viewed more than two million times. Gruber, “How AI Can Enhance Our Memory.” 54. Gruber, “How AI Can Enhance Our Memory.” 55. Gruber, “How AI Can Enhance Our Memory.” 56. TEDx, “A Conversation about Conversational AI,” TEDxBeaconStreet, January 17, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoCwsvIyp9Y. The conversation was between Gruber and the tech journalist John Markoff. 57. It is worth noting that Gruber was once an aspiring magician. 58. Ray Kurzweil has published many books predicting a Singularity, a time when humans and machines will become one. See Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines. 59. From the conference program. 60. Bell and Gemmell, Your Life, Uploaded, 139. The book was classified as selfhelp, and Bill Gates wrote the foreword to it. 61. Bell and Gemmell, Your Life, Uploaded, 151. 62. Atkinson, “The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer.” 63. Atkinson, “The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer,” 173. 64. Vivint was founded by Keith Nellesen and Todd Pederson in 1999 and acquired by the Blackstone Group in 2012 before going public in 2020. Before 2011, the company was called APX Alarm Security Solutions. 65. John Durham Peters and Ben Peters have written about the uniqueness of Mormonism’s relationship with media and its theotechnical assemblages. Peters and Peters, “Introduction.” 66. I wrote about the MTA and its connection to Silicon Valley technoculture with Ben Peters. See Kneese and Peters, “Mormon Mommies Will Never Die.” For a history of queerness and race within Mormon cosmology and sexual practice, see Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods. 67. MTA website, transfigurism.org.

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68. For more on male exit fantasies, see Sharma, “Exit and the Extensions of Man,” and Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” For more on fantasies of earthly escape and invisible care labor with regard to space, see Gál, “Climate Change, COVID, and the Space Cabin.” For more on earthly abandonment and the religious resonances of male preppers, see Roberts and Hogan, “Left Behind.” 69. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”; Sandoval, “Re-entering Cyberspace.” 70. Hayles, “Wrestling with Transhumanism.” See also her earlier work on posthumanism and embodiment in relation to science fiction: Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. 71. The anthropologist Jon Bialecki published an entire book based on his ethnography of Mormon transhumanism. See Bialecki, Machines for Making Gods. 72. Lincoln Cannon and I have been in touch for many years, thanks to John Durham Peters and Ben Peters. We have had several phones calls and email exchanges, along with several formal interviews, but we have never met in person. He is the one who introduced me to Bill and David so I could view the Transhuman House. 73. Full disclosure: I recognized David’s Long Now card because I also have one. I joined the Long Now Foundation in 2012 to gain access to its events and to mingle with its staff. 74. The Transhuman House, Foundation Retreat VC Pitch Deck, house.transhu manity.net/retreat, accessed April 26, 2022. 75. Peters, Speaking into the Air. 76. I was fortunate to plan my trip shortly before its closure, despite the hazards of traveling with a baby. I could spend only a few hours at the Transhuman House because I had to pump milk to feed my newborn son. 77. Kelley, “The End of the Transhuman House.” 78. The Transhuman House, house.transhumanity.net. 79. Krznaric, “Six Ways to Think Long-Term.” 80. Rose, “The Mormon Vaults.” 81. Kelly, “Clock in the Mountain.” 82. Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, 150. 83. Okorafor, “Mother of Invention.” 84. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” www.metmu seum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/afrofuturist-period-room. 85. Stephanie Dinkins, “Not the Only One,” www.stephaniedinkins.com/ntoo. html. 86. See Jackson, Becoming Human, for a rich theorization of posthumanism based on histories of anti-Blackness and racialized maternity.

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Conclusion 1. Del Valle, “How GoFundMe’s New Pages Take a Sensitive Approach to Grief.” See also this Facebook post: “Request to Memorialize or Remove an Account,” www. facebook.com/help/1111566045566400. 2. Gain, “Tech Billionaires.” 3. Thrasher, “There Is Nothing Normal.” 4. Eagleman, “A Brief History of Death Switches,” 282. Eagleman later published a version of the story in his speculative fiction collection, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives. Sum was generally well received, becoming a New York Times bestseller. It also attracted the attention of both Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. According to Eagleman (whom I interviewed over the phone as part of my dissertation research), Kevin Kelly and his wife used Sum as “dream stokers.” They would read one of the stories before bed and try to dream about the possible afterlife attached to the tale. As a result of his appreciation of Sum, Brand personally invited Eagleman to join the Long Now Foundation in 2011. 5. Eagleman, “A Brief History of Death Switches,” 282. 6. Eagleman, Sum, 68. 7. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Ullman, “Programming the Post-human”; Braidotti, The Posthuman. 8. Raley, “Dataveillance and Countervailance”; Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data. 9. Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation.” Joshua Barbeau created a chatbot of his long-dead fiancée, which brought him comfort during the social isolation of Covid-19. Her family was sympathetic, but her mother did not want to interact with the bot version of her dead daughter. 10. MyHeritage, Deep Nostalgia, www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia. MyHeritage also has offices in Lehi, Utah, and is partnered with the Mormon FamilySearch. 11. Kneese, “How Data Can Create Full-On Apparitions of the Dead.” The digital humanities scholar Marisa Parham describes the strangeness of seeing MyHeritage’s technology applied to Frederick Douglass, imposing modern movement on the most photographed Black person of the nineteenth century. She wrote about this in a Twitter thread and related essay. Parham, “This Morning in Blackness.” 12. See El-Hadi, “Faces of Histories.” 13. McCray, The Visioneers. 14. Newton, “Speak, Memory.” Replika is now a therapy or companion-oriented company, less focused on creating a replica of your personality to live on after your death, although the technology is the same as it was with the Luka bot. 15. Turkle, Alone Together.

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16. Replika.ai; Bardhan, “Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends.” 17. Eterni.me is no longer a viable website, but founder Marius Ursache wrote about the company and its goals in a Medium post. As of this writing, Eterni.me redirects to this post: medium.com/@mariusursache/the-journey-to-digital-immortality33fcbd79949. 18. Needleman, “Intellitar Avatars a Poor Substitute for Afterlife.” 19. Bina48’s Twitter account is at twitter.com/ibina48. 20. Dinkins, “Conversations with Bina48,” www.stephaniedinkins.com/conversa tions-with-bina48.html. 21. Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations, 198. For more on the afterlives of slavery, see Hartman, Lose Your Mother, which provides an archival and personal account of slavery’s imprint on the contemporary world and its reverberations in intimate domestic settings. See also Sharpe, In the Wake, on how the afterlives of slavery have made Black death, and anti-Blackness in general, central to American political life. Sharpe likens the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness to the weather. 22. Friend, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever.” 23. Pow, “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors,” 203. 24. Jaffe, “Social Reproduction and the Pandemic.” 25. Dubal, “Essentially Dispossessed”; Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. 26. Cottom, “The Hustle Economy.” 27. Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 142. 28. See Kneese, “A Responsible Death.” 29. Miller, “Boom Time for Death Planning.” 30. Cowles, “How I Get It Done.” 31. Arthur, quoted in Beech, “How Do You Foster ‘a Good Death in a Racist Society’?” 32. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm. 33. Kneese, “Pay It Forward.” 34. Bain, “Gig Workers Demand Occupational Death Benefits.” 35. See Rida Qadri on how gig workers’ ad hoc practices and material rituals constitute their own form of disruption. Qadri, “ ‘Disruption’ Is a Two-Way Street.”

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Index

Bell, Gordon, 160, 164–66 Benjamin, Ruha, 40 Berlant, Lauren, 78 Bezos, Jeff, 21, 157–58 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 191 Bialecki, Jon, 215n71 Bina48, 189–90 Bitmark, 132 Black Lives Matter, 39–40 Black Mirror (sci-fi series), 6 Black Panther (Okorafor), 179 Boas, Franz, 14 bodies, 14–15 Bonchek Adams, Lisa, 76 Borchard Foundation on Law and Aging, 136–37 Boston Estate Planning Council, 107 Bouk, Dan, 200n50 Bowker, Geoff, 213n44 Bradbury, Ray, 153 Brand, Stewart: Eagleman and, 216n4; Long Now Foundation and, 143, 157, 172–73, 177–79, 185; power relations and, 159–60; WELL (electronic community) and, 64, 72–73 “A Brief History of Death Switches” (Eagleman), 183–86 Brilliant, Larry, 72–73 Brock, André, 198n21

accelerationism, 20–21, 123, 157 Afrofuturism, 180 Airbnb, 154–55 Alameddine, Ross, 38–39 Alexa, 143, 151 Amazon, 149. See also Alexa American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 130 American Bar Association (ABA), 119 The American Way of Death (Mitford), 100 anderson, ken, 212n15 angel investing, 115–16. See also venture capitalists (VCs) AngelList, 127–28 Arthur, Alua, 193–94 artificial intelligence (AI), 20–22, 57. See also Singularity Aspen, Bina, 189–90 attention economy, 32, 47, 91, 93 Bain, Vanessa, 195–96 Banner, Olivia, 200n51 Barbeau, Joshua, 216n9 Barbo, Cody, 128–31, 136 Barbrook, Richard, 18 Barlow, John Perry, 64, 206n24 Barthes, Roland, 13 Baym, Nancy, 199n26 Beirut bombings (2015), 53

249

INDEX

communicative traces: concept of, 6, 15–18; digital immortality and, 184–91; financial and affective value of, 31, 45–51, 56–57, 101–2, 118, 125, 140; surveillance and, 5, 47, 192. See also digital assets; digital estate planning; digital remains; illness blogs Computer History Museum (Mountain View, California), 156–57 Cottom, Tressie McMillan, 192 Covid-19 pandemic, 8–9, 182–83, 191–96 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 145–46, 169 Cowen, Deborah, 191–92 Cox, Lee Ann, 81–82, 83–84, 87–89, 93–95 crowdfunding, 7, 101, 111, 183, 192, 195–96 Csordas, Thomas J., 198n13 Current, Michael, 14 cyborgs, 189–90

Brooks, Lonny, 213n44 Brubaker, Jed, 58–59 Buolamwini, Joy, 201n72 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 194 Butler, Octavia, 180 Californian Ideology. See Silicon Valley culture Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018), 40 Cameron, Andy, 18 The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 67 Cannon, Lincoln, 167, 170 Caraballo, Leonor, 67–68, 69 Card Blue (blog), 81–82, 83–84, 86–89, 93–95 care work, 7, 8–9, 11, 90–91. See also digital death care practices Carroll, Evan, 92–93, 109, 110, 134–35 Catalyst (journal), 76–79 Certified Financial Analyst Institute, 209n20 Chan, Kathy H., 55 Chan, Priscilla, 138–39 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 8 Charise, Andrea, 54 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 11 Cirrus Legacy, 110, 112 Clock of the Long Now (10,000 Year Clock), 21, 157–58, 178–79 CNN, 38 co-authorship, 77–79 Cole, Nat King, 49 Cole, Natalie, 49 Coleman, Gabriella, 73 Columbine High School shootings (1999), 52–53 commodity fetishism, 11 communicative capitalism, 15, 91

Dark Cloud (illness blog), 77–79 data: origins of term, 11. See also communicative traces; digital remains Datacoup, 205n12 data mining, 48 Dead Man’s Switch, 110, 117, 133–34 Dean, Jodi, 15 death glitches: concept of, 4–9; radical potential of, 191–96; types of and emotional responses to, 66, 93, 94–95, 123. See also digital death care practices death management, 102–8, 192–93. See also digital estate planning; life insurance industry

250

INDEX

digital memorialization practices: Facebook and, 5–6, 7–8, 32–35, 36–39, 40–45, 53–62, 183; memorial websites and, 1–3, 52–53; qualitative studies on, 9–10; Virginia Tech shootings (2007) and, 31–32, 35, 36–39, 41–45, 47–48, 51; virtual cemeteries and, 34–35 Digital Public, 132 digital remains: concept of, 6, 10–15; illness blogs as, 88–89; legislation on, 99–100, 118–22. See also digital death care practices; digital estate planning; digital memorialization practices digital thrownness, 16 Dinkins, Stephanie, 180, 190 domain names, 93 domestic violence, 150 Douglass, Frederick, 216n11 Dubal, Veena, 191

death studies, 9–10 Deathswitch, 110, 114, 185 death switches, 183–86 deepfakes, 6, 186 Denton, Nick, 39 digital assets: as democratizing force, 110–11, 137; messiness of, 117–22. See also digital remains Digital Beyond (blog), 92–93, 109, 110, 134–35 digital death care practices: Covid-19 pandemic and, 191–96; illness blogs and, 63–66, 69–70, 89–96; impact of platform infrastructure on, 3–10; Mormon transhumanism and, 168–69; power structures and, 7–9, 75, 191–96; women and, 7, 75. See also digital estate planning; smart technologies; social media memorials Digital Equipment Corporation, 165–66 digital estate planning: challenges of, 134–40; Covid-19 pandemic and, 191–96; democratization of, 129–30, 131–34, 193–96; digital immortality and, 187; messiness of digital assets and, 117–22; platform temporality and, 24, 114–17, 138–39; startup models for, 100–102, 108–17, 123–31 digital immortality, 9, 10, 156–66, 184–91 Digital Immortality: Exploring Concept and Consequences (symposium, 2018), 156–64 digital inheritance, 12–13. See also digital death care practices; digital remains digital legacy laws, 120–22

Eagleman, David, 183–86 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 64, 206n24 Ellsworth, Justin, 119 emotional labor, 89–90 Eno, Brian, 157 Entrustnet, 59 ephemerality. See platform temporality essential workers, 8–9, 192, 194 Estate Assist, 127–28 estate law, 118–22 estate planning, 97–100, 107–8, 110, 192–93. See also digital estate planning Eterni.me, 188 European Union (EU), 119

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Google, 120, 141, 142, 160 Google+, 1 GraphicSprings, 210n32 grief tourists and trolls, 34–35 Gruber, Tom, 160, 161–62 Guardian (newspaper), 76 gun control activism, 44

Facebook: demographics of, 51–52; digital memorialization practices and, 5–6, 7–8, 32–35, 36–39, 40–45, 53–62, 183; early history of, 35–36, 37, 40, 45; memorialization policy and, 42–43, 47–50, 54–62, 120, 121; metaverse and, 148–49; privacy rights and, 119–20; safety-check feature on, 53; Virginia Tech shootings (2007) and, 31–32, 35, 36–39, 41–45, 47–48, 51 Farman, Abou, 67–68, 69, 161 Federici, Silvia, 207n62 Financial Analysts Federation, 209n20 Floyd, George, 195 Foley, Kevin, 81–82, 83–84, 86–89, 93–95 Forbes (magazine), 37 Forlano, Laura, 79 Forsén, Lena, 201n72 Friendster, 45, 210n37

hacking, 150 Hafner, Katie, 72–75 Haigh, Thomas, 213n34 Hallam, Elizabeth, 200n45 Hanamura, Wendy, 197n2 Haraway, Donna, 12–13, 168 Hartman, Saidiya, 217n21 hashtag activism, 40 Hastreiter, Kim, 64, 71–72 Hawking, Stephen, 80 Hayles, N. Katherine, 169 @heaven (Hastreiter), 64, 71–72 heirlooms, 12–13, 97–99. See also digital remains Her (film, 2013), 161–62 Hermosillo, Carmen, 206n34 Hill, Kashmir, 154 Hillis, Danny, 157 Hochschild, Arlie, 89–90 Hockey, Jenny, 200n45 Hoffman, Frederick, 105–7 Holy Fire (Sterling), 179 Honeywell Kitchen Computer, 146, 147, 165–66 Hu, Tung-Hui, 192, 199n26 Hughes, Chris, 36 Humphreys, Lee, 13, 48 hustle economy, 192

Gates, Bill, 148, 174 Gebru, Timnit, 201n72 Gemmell, Jim, 164 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 119 Germany, 121 Get Your Shit Together (GYST), 113 Gibson, William, 200n46 The Gift (Mauss), 11–12 gift giving, 11–12 Gig Workers Collective, 195–96 Gilliard, Chris, 209n27 GitHub, 158 glitches, 4–5. See also death glitches GoFundMe, 7, 183 Going with Grace, 193–94 Goldstein, Daniel, 128, 130 The Good Ancestor (Krznaric), 177

Idlewild, Willow, 132–33, 136–37 illness blogs: death as forthcoming in, 66–70; digital death care practices

252

INDEX

89–90; smart technologies and, 15–16, 145–50, 155. See also care work Lagerkvist, Amanda, 16 Lake Alabaster Box, 127–28 Laqueur, Thomas, 7 Latter-day Saints (LDS) Church. See Mormon transhumanism Lazzarato, Maurizio, 207n61 Leaver, Tama, 46–47 Legacy Locker, 110, 124–25, 126, 136 legal wills, 105, 108, 119 Le Guin, Ursula K., 180 Lemmon Drops (blog), 82 Liboiron, Max, 207n44 Library of Congress, 30 life insurance industry, 100–101, 102–8, 111, 115–16 LifeNaut, 189 Lindner, Julie, 1–3 Lindner, Paul, 1–3 LinkedIn, 31 Lipner, Mia, 14 LiveJournal, 45 Long Now Foundation: Clock of the Long Now and, 21, 157–58, 178–79; Eagleman and, 185, 216n4; mission of, 143, 177–79; smart technologies and, 156–58, 159; Transhuman House (Provo, Utah) and, 172–73 Lorde, Audre, 67 Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 194 Lovink, Geert, 23, 206n35 Lustig, Nate, 59

and, 63–66, 69–70, 89–96; early history of, 75–76; as extensions of the self and collective endeavors, 76–85; online forums as antecedents of, 63–64, 70–75; platform temporality and, 68–69; terminal identity and, 86–89 Instagram, 31 Institute for the Future (IFTF), 156–57 Intel, 125 Intellitar, 189 Internet Archive, 1–3, 14, 23, 30 Internet of Shit, 144 Internet of Things (IoT). See smart technologies intimate public, 78 Isla Vista mass shooting (2014), 44 Jain, S. Lochlann, 67 Jarrett, Kylie, 199n28 Jenkins, Craig, 30 Johansson, Scarlett, 161–62 Kahle, Brewster, 197n1 Kaplan, Jerry, 160 Kardashian, Kim, 186 Karppi, Tero, 46 Kelley, David J., 169, 172–77 Kelly, Kevin, 157, 178, 216n4 Kidder, Tracy, 152 kinship networks, 158–60 Krznaric, Roman, 177 Kurzweil, Ray, 22, 163 Kuyda, Eugenia, 187–88

Malignant (Jain), 67 Mandel, Tom, 63–64, 71–75, 96 Manley, M. A., 210n51 Markoff, John, 156–57, 161–62 Martin, Trayvon, 53–54 Martinez, Richard, 44

labor: communicative traces and, 15–17; digital platforms and, 47, 49, 183; essential workers and, 8–9, 192, 194; power structures and, 65–66,

253

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MyHeritage, 186 MyLifeBits, 164–65 MySpace, 34, 36, 45

Marx, Karl, 11, 15 Massimi, Michael, 54 Mauldin, Laura, 80 Mauss, Marcel, 11–12 Mazurenko, Roman, 187–88 Mbembe, Achille, 7, 192 McCray, Patrick, 187 McKittrick, Katherine, 198n21 McNeil, Joanne, 205n5, 206n34 media studies, 10 media traces, 13 memorialization policies, 30–31, 42–43, 47–50, 54–62 memorial websites, 1–3, 52–53 Merid, Beza, 76, 209n11 Mialet, Hélène, 80 Microsoft, 149, 174 Miller, Airdrie, 92–95 Miller, Derek K., 92–95 Mills, C. Wright, 105 Mills, Mara, 76 Mitchell, Nick, 205n14 Mitford, Jessica, 100 Moravec, Hans, 169 More Work for Mother (Cowan), 145–46 Mormon transhumanism, 166–78 Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA), 167–69 Moroni (angel), 174, 175 mortuary rites, 6–7, 13, 100–101, 194. See also digital memorialization practices; estate planning “Mother of Invention” (Okorafor), 179–80 mourning photography, 13 Mulvin, Dylan, 201n72 Murphy, Michelle, 208n6 Murray, Stuart J., 76–79 Musk, Elon, 168

National Association of Estate Planners and Councils (NAEPC), 107–8 Nature (journal), 183–86 necropolitics, 7, 9, 192 Neiman Marcus, 146, 147, 165–66 Nellesen, Keith, 214n64 neoliberalism, 18–23 network anthropology, 25 Networked Mortality, 132–33 network society, 17 New Yorker (magazine), 36 New York Times (newspaper), 6, 72, 152, 192 NFTs (non-fungible tokens), 118 #NotOneMore campaign, 44 NPR (National Public Radio), 38–39 Nyong’o, Tavia, 190 Okorafor, Nnedi, 179–80 O’Neil, Cathy, 172 O’Reilly, Tim, 17 Ostler, Blaire, 168–69, 170–71 parabiosis, 23 Parham, Marisa, 216n11 Paris attacks (November 2015), 53 Pasek, Anne, 197n8 PasswordBox, 125 PayPal, 123 Pederson, Todd, 214n64 Penmachine (blog), 93 Perpetu, 110, 113–14, 118–19 Perpetual Memorials (website), 52–53 Peters, Ben, 214n65 Peters, John Durham, 142, 214n65

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responsible death practices, 104–7, 111–12, 114, 193 Reynold, Chanel, 113 Rheingold, Howard, 70, 72, 74 RIP trolling, 34–35 Romano, John, 109, 134–35 Rose, Alexander, 178 Ross, Ivy, 141, 142, 160 Rothblatt, Martine, 189–90 Russell, Legacy, 4–5

Phillips, Whitney, 34–35 Phoenix, Joaquin, 161–62 photographs, 13 planned obsolescence, 9, 22, 145, 155–56, 158 platform temporality: concept and impact of, 4, 182–83; digital estate planning and, 24, 114–17, 138–39; illness blogs and, 68–69; power structures and, 139–40; Silicon Valley culture and, 18–23; social media memorials and, 32, 40–45, 48, 52–53 Posada, Julian, 211n8 postmortem photography, 13 Pow, Whit, 191, 197n8 power structures and power relations: digital death care practices and, 7–9, 75, 191–96; digital platforms and, 17–18; kinship networks and, 158–60; labor and, 65–66, 89–90; platform temporality and, 139–40; smart technologies and, 146–50 Prabhakar, Arati, 160 privacy rights, 119–20 Probate and Property Magazine (ABA), 119 probate system, 107, 131 Prudential Insurance Company of America, 104–7, 116

safety-check features, 53 Saffo, Paul, 160 Salon (magazine), 89 Sandberg, Sheryl, 57 #SayHerName, 40 science fiction, 153, 179–80 scientific management (Taylorism), 146 self-care, 193, 194 Serlin, David, 76 Shakur, Tupac, 49 Sharpe, Christina, 217n21 Silicon Valley culture: platform temporality and, 18–23; smart technologies and, 156–64; startup models and, 115–17, 123–31; transhumanism and, 20–22, 187; WELL (electronic community) and, 72–75 Simon, Herbert, 202n3 Singularity, 20–22, 161–62, 163, 187–88. See also transhumanism smart technologies: digital immortality and, 156–66; digital remains and, 6, 10; as haunted, 141–45; labor and, 15–16, 145–50, 155; Mormon transhumanism and, 166–78; as service to future generations, 177–81; surveillance and, 141, 150–51; as weird inheritances, 151–56

Qadri, Rida, 217n35 RAND Corporation, 157 Rash, Randy, 119–20 religious cosmology, 156–57 “Remembering Tamara Kneese,” 57 Replika, 188 Requiem Digitatem (Lipner), 14 research methods, 4, 23–26

255

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Taylor, Breonna, 195 Taylorism (scientific management), 146 technoculture, 116 techno-optimism, 163–64 techno-solutionism, 10, 123 techno-utopianism, 18–23, 149, 160–62 Templeton Foundation, 156–57 10,000 Year Clock (Clock of the Long Now), 21, 157–58, 178–79 Terasem Movement Foundation, 189–90 terminality, 67–68 thanosensitivity, 54 “There Will Come Soft Rains” (Bradbury), 153 Thiel, Peter, 23 Threadcraft, Shatema, 203n23 Toeman, Jeremy, 124–26, 131 Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell), 164 Transhuman House (Provo, Utah), 169–77 transhumanism: digital immortality and, 10, 161–63, 184–91; Mandel and, 75; research methods and, 25–26; on sexual reproduction, 169; Silicon Valley culture and, 20–22; smart technologies and, 143–44. See also Mormon transhumanism trusts, 107–8, 131 Trust & Will, 128–31, 130, 136 Tuerk, Andreas, 120 Turner, Fred, 210n49 Turner, Maxine, 42–45 Twitter, 30–31, 82, 94, 121–22

Smith, Joseph, 174 Snapchat, 48 Snitzer, Albert, 97–99 social media memorials: affective and commercial value of, 45–51, 56–57; Facebook and, 5–6, 7–8, 32–35, 36–39, 40–45, 53–62, 183; impact of design decisions on, 53–62; memorialization policies and, 30–31, 42–43, 47–50, 54–62; platform temporality and, 32, 40–45, 48, 52–53; social movements and, 39–40; Virginia Tech shootings (2007) and, 31–32, 35, 36–39, 41–45, 47–48, 51 social movements, 39–40, 195 The Social Network (2010 film), 40 Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, 209n20 Sorkin, Aaron, 40 The Soul of a New Machine (Kidder), 152 Spigel, Lynn, 146 spirit photography, 13, 142 spiritual telegraph, 142 Splinter News (news website), 154 Stanford University, 159–60 Star, Susan Leigh, 155 Steinberg, Deborah Lynn, 76–79 Sterling, Bruce, 179 Stewart, Bill, 169–77 Strathern, Marilyn, 12–13 Sum (Eagleman), 216n4 surveillance: communicative traces and, 5, 47, 192; digital estate planning and, 112, 138; smart technologies and, 141, 150–51 Sutherland, Tonia, 53–54 Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 158 Syndicus, Maria, 73–75

ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), 146–48 Ullman, Ellen, 74, 204–5n2

256

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West, Jessamyn, 152–54 West, Kanye, 186 West, Tom, 152–54, 180 Whole Earth Catalog (magazine), 157, 204–5n2. See also WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, virtual community) Wiener, Anna, 74 Wired (magazine), 72, 157, 159 women: care work and, 7, 8–9, 11, 90–91; digital death care practices and, 7, 75; digital estate planning and, 113, 193; Mormon transhumanism and, 167–68; smart technologies and, 146–50, 151, 162 Women and Performance (journal), 14 Woods, Juno, 42–44, 62

Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA, 2015), 121–22 Ursache, Marius, 188 U.S. Department of Labor, 195–96 USA Today (newspaper), 37 “The Veldt” (Bradbury), 213n38 venture capitalists (VCs), 115–16, 124, 127–30 Virginia Tech shootings (2007), 31–32, 35, 36–39, 41–45, 47–48, 51 virtual badges, 37–38 virtual cemeteries, 34–35 The Virtual Community (Rheingold), 70 Vivint Smart Home (Provo, Utah), 166–67

xkcd (webcomic), 51–52

Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 6 Washington Post (newspaper), 38 Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), 1–3, 14, 23 Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil), 172 Weatherby, Leif, 201n58 WebCease, 126–27 websites. See memorial websites Web 2.0, 17, 45–46 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 187–88 The Well (Hafner), 72–75 WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, virtual community), 63–64, 70–75 Wernimont, Jacqueline, 198n13, 200n49

Yip, Megan, 121–22, 132–33, 136–37 Yip-Williams, Julie, 76 Your Digital Afterlife (Carroll and Romano), 134–35 Your Digital Estate (Yip and Idlewild), 136–37 Your Life Uploaded (Bell and Gemmell), 164 Zachary, Gregg, 156–57 Zelizer, Viviana, 104, 114 Zimmerman, Eilene, 101 Zuckerberg, Mark, 8, 40, 138–39, 148–49

257