Death, and how tech forgot about mortality
summary
Most people have no plan for their digital afterlife—3 in 5 UK adults lack a will—and platforms routinely disappear (Bebo died twice, Twitter purged inactive accounts), while grief tech startups and apps like Here and After, Replica AI, MyHeritage reanimate dead profiles; estimated market value hits £100 billion. Hardware decay, bit rot, and corporate bankruptcy threaten backups; institutions (Harvard holding Renty and Delia photos) and projects like the Wayback Machine and People's History of Tech show preservation is uneven and contested.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:17The digital landscape
- 5:47The concept of falsehoods
- 8:58Personhood and death
- 11:59Digital afterlife and grief
- 17:56Platform accountability
- 22:31Materiality of the internet
- 24:59Data preservation and labor
- 31:29Reframing our future
