“How shall I find the life for which I am searching? There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time?”

― Epic of Gilgamesh

The application Replika is an artificial intelligence chatbot service through which a user can design and have intimate simulated conversations with a customized avatar, a “companion who cares.¹ Using natural language–processing algorithms (found in apps like Siri or Alexa), it’s designed to psychologically help people by learning to recognize feelings, memories, dreams, and thoughts to understand and support its users. While not providing professional psychological help, Replika can become a best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, or mentor to help a user move out of negative thoughts, loneliness, or a bad day. However, Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda originally envisioned it to have a different function—the app was created as an act of remembrance. Deeply affected by the death of her close friend Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda desired to keep him alive through an AI system created by the San Francisco–based startup firm Luka. Inspired by the 2013 Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” Kuyda collected thousands of messages she exchanged with Mazurenko. Through that data she constructed his digital ghost (also referred to as a “thanabot” or “grief- bot”) that produces real dialogue written in the style of his language and mannerisms to simulate a continued relationship² The chatbot gave an externally responsive dimension to the dynamic of Kuyda’s mourning. It is a medium in multiple senses: a form of communication between two parties (human and computer), but also a middle ground wherein the living and dead may meet. The Replika avatar appears completely dressed in black in a white room with nothing else around, suspended in an imaginary reality beyond the human world.

At a time when Western culture is experiencing anxieties and concerns about AI technologies, we’re left wondering, if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? Conceiving that people might persist eternally through data raises questions around digital immortality and the recodification of death rittuals that transform the perception we have of life’s finitude, and ultimately, our sense of loss. AI and social media alike have facilitated unprecedented interactions between the deceased and the living that continue to evolve. What effects can these interactions produce, and what limits, if any, should be placed on their use? What role does individual identity play, and how does it transform itself? Can we stay in some sense alive through data? Digital immortality brings forth unique cultural, technical, social, ethical, and legal challenges that mustn’t go unrecognized. The persistence of the online posthumous self, and its current opportunities and limitations, now need to be considered.

The quest for immortality can be found throughout human history; from the cuneiform tablets of Nineveh, among the oldest written documents, to Egyptian artefacts used to communicate with deities in hopes of guaranteeing an eternal world. To this day, the premise of spiritual immortality is simple: we die, but an energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in an afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. In the digital age, the promise to live forever is found online. Online platforms enable us to create avatars that persist long after our physical death and preserve aspects of our personhood indefinitely. A social media profile acts as an expansive biographical space—a self-narration characterized by a fluid and fragmented digital identity, performed by selecting and sharing individual and collective memories. It displays a string of gestures informing the trace a user wishes to leave behind. In death, these digital traces become digital legacies that can be preserved, bequeathed, or erased. A deceased person’s profile thus articulates a digital body—an informational corpse made up of a person’s data. What’s significant about this is that a dead person’s profile does not automatically get removed from the platform, but remains side by side with the living, leaving digital footprints forever in reach of the bereaved. For most users on social media, grieving rituals are no longer only first-hand experiences centred around the physical corpse, but practices increasingly filtered through the screens on our everyday devices. Users participate in online grieving processes shaped by the social media platforms in play, but these platforms are designed to accrue profit according to capitalist algorithmic logic that is rooted in the measurable value of popularity. Therefore, as death is increasingly ritualized through these platforms, where the posthumous online self persists, the promise of digital afterlife becomes a sought-after commodity.

Virtual spaces for memorialization offer us the potential to create new rituals associated with the dead while still honouring traditional ones. People who are grieving often experience the paradigm of “continuing bonds,³ in which it is normal for the bereaved to continue their relationship with the dead—to feel observed by them and remain connected—to cope with their loss and adjustment. Continuing bonds should be thought of not as mere ideas or feelings, but as relational ties that are active in the world. Because social media functions as a semi-public archive, the dead can now be memorialized outside of the traditional physical limitations of cemeteries or shrines. This means that digital rituals of mourning are provided with an expansive space that allows for multiple interactions to coexist between living users and the dead, giving users tools to invoke prolonged, intimate bonds with the dead, and promoting a redefined understanding of loss. In this digitized world, the dead have not disappeared into the earth, but rather they wait patiently in a state of suspension for the swipe of a finger, the click of a mouse, or importantly, when the algorithms dictate, to conjure them back into existence. Social media platforms provide socially situated spaces to grieve that enable the proliferation of “posthumously persistent” profiles and offer the promise of immortality by way of a digital afterlife⁴

With visions of digital immortalization comes the commercialization of this desire. Commercial enterprises were among the first to recognize the challenges and opportunities brought about by the increasing numbers of dead internet users. What first appeared as a problem for businesses eventually gave rise to the development of a number of innovative services, now referred to as the “digital afterlife industry,” which includes posthumous messaging that makes it possible for users to send video, audio, or text messages to a chosen “heir” at the date and location of their choosing, and recreation services that use personal data to generate new content replicating a dead person’s social behaviour. The commodity here is the afterlife, which of course, comes at a price. Poised against the horizons of “forever,” these services project our agencies into a future where we may be resurrected as a virtual presence and obfuscate our finitude altogether. The digital afterlife industry is quietly reshaping systems of care, intimacy, memorial, and personhood. If it is truly feasible to stay alive through data, then every one of us may need to actively consider the ethical and existential complications that come with such a possibility. Most pressingly, will we even be human if it is?⁵

Jerusalem-born artist Oreet Ashery invites speculation about the lucrative machinations of the digital afterlife industry, which is embedded in consumerist calculations and class politics⁶ Ashery wrote and directed the twelve-episode, open-access, and web-based video series Revisiting Genesis (2016–ongoing) that explores the philosophical, practical, and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death and our digital afterlives. The series comes from Ashery’s own experiences of witnessing friends and artists dying online, in particular Alexis Hunter, who documented her final days on Facebook. For Ashery, this experience described the precarious nature of digital legacy, which occupies the public space of remembrance and forgetting⁷ The series follows three main narratives: 1) Genesis, the titular character whose presence is that of a disappearing figure, who harbours the desire to withdraw from professional and even physical existence; 2) Bambi, played by artist Martin O’Brien (whose appearance in the video is tied to his own illness of cystic fibrosis), who considers new products and services to maintain his digital legacy; and 3) subjects with real life-limiting conditions, discussing genuine situations of life and death. The episodes pivot around two nurses, both named Jackie (loosely inspired by the contemporary American television series Nurse Jackie), who weave through the three storylines and discuss the construction of posthumous biographical slide shows with subjects who are preparing for death. The shared focus between these narratives is the notion of preparation—preparing to physically die but digitally persist. In suggesting that we “Revisit Genesis,” Ashery subsequently asks, what does the act of revisiting prepare? Genesis, the name of the central figure, means origin. In proposing that we revisit our origins, Ashery suggests a rebirth—a second origin—and rethinks the process of generating human identity in the present, technological age, where the physical self and the digital self are so deeply intertwined⁸

Bambi’s story resides in the scripted and improvised meetings between himself and Nurse Jackie. Jackie tries to resolve Bambi’s digital will and posthumous presence, although Bambi softly pushes back against her suggestions. He is sceptical of the digital afterlife industry, and considers its existential toll. Will the sale of his internet assets give rise to a “digital ghost”?⁹ Through Bambi’s resistance, Ashery critiques an industry that preys on the dying and vulnerable and offers the audience a space to contemplate their own attitudes toward digital asset–management services.¹⁰ Nurse Jackie walks Bambi through digital-will services, including digital storage spaces and managers, where a person who is dying can assign a trusted legacy contact to have access to all of their digital life. She shows Bambi advertisements for online archive repackaging, and brochures for posthumous video messaging, where the dying can dispatch videos to loved ones decades into the future. The commercial nature of these materials sheds light on how the data we leave behind are not a useless resource, but one used by companies to extract profits even after we’re gone. If the commodities of such companies are represented by a user’s personal data, Ashery suggests that the privacy and dignity of the dead must be considered.

The vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies. Art historian T. J. Demos calls Revisiting Genesis an investigation of “neoliberal necropolitics,” recalling Achille Mbembe’s (2003) reworking of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics (1978). As Mbembe reminds us, necropolitics involves “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” in which the order of power invested in the fostering of life finds its corollary in the reproduction of relations of enmity, impunity, and the right to kill or expose to death.¹¹ While the show’s main aim is to prompt conversations about the taboo subjects of death and digital personhood, Ashery also highlights different forms of marginalization—from what it means to be a person of colour, to being working class, to being a migrant— and how economies of marginalization are amplified in illness. The final episode features a song written by Ashery, inspired by the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead. A voice sings, “We are homeless / Children of the government / And how we live is how we die / Only more so.” The lyrics speak to how forms of relation that structure our social lives also condition our mortality. Not only do the privileges that one has or does not have in life determine the conditions of one’s healthcare and death, they also define one’s posthumous representations.¹²

The work of Danish artist Stine Deja similarly critiques the West’s wide-eyed optimism about technology’s potential to preserve life. Following her research on cryopreservation methods, Deja produced a series of kinetic sculptures and animations, Suspended Vision (2019), Thermal Womb (2020), and Cold Sleep (2021), that explore the social and ethical implications of cryogenics and its recent uptake. Deja’s interest revolves around the most-established cryopreservation company, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, that freezes and preserves bodies in the middle of the Arizona desert. Patients who have elected and paid for the procedure are placed into thermal sleeping bags and immersed into tanks of liquid nitrogen where they are frozen at 196 degrees celsius below zero and stored for future resuscitation. “A person who can be resuscitated is not dead,” explains the company. “Therefore if cryonics patients are preserved well enough that they might someday be resuscitated, then they aren’t dead: they are cryopreserved.”¹³ Although Deja’s work touches upon physical preservation rather than digital, she poses a similar commentary to Ashery: she postulates a genesis of rebirth in a time when technology will catch up to the demand for immortality, to construct and deconstruct futures.

Afterlife technologies, both cryonic and digital, have engendered a new kind of subjectivity; a person is not simply dead, but always in a state of “becoming frozen.” The person enters into relation with a potential future and with a massive realm of incalculable contingency that must be continually managed by stewards of the afterlife industry¹⁴ The production of an immortal subject—alive, dead, or in the uncanny space of suspension—arises out of the promise to fulfil a boundless desire to preserve the personhood of the dead. Deja, like Ashery, similarly critiques neoliberal necropolitics: the privatization of an industry selling a future where death can be avoided, and where income inequality is a matter of life and death. “So many people can’t even afford to have a life whilst they are alive,” Deja explains, “but then some people are privileged enough to try for a second life.¹⁵ In an afterlife industry where hopeful resurrection is only available for the wealthy, implying a certain conception of survival of the fittest, class differences would further be extrapolated to mean the difference between a normal lifespan and living, potentially, indefinitely. Deja echoes Ashery’s sentiment: How we live is how we die, only more so.

While offering us immortality by promising to store, as it were, our personality after our departure, the digital afterlife industry leaves us with an existential challenge. Individuals are now able to extend their personal identities beyond the physical limits of their bodies, challenging the human subject as a finite, bounded entity. Digital immortality reformulates the division between life and death, affecting commemoration and mourning, but also identity and agency. If the afterlife is a product to be bought, who is it being marketed toward, and who can afford its promise? What does it mean to have a corporate entity own and manage your afterlife? These questions are leading some to make pre-mortem decisions to manage their post-death digital presence, for instance in the form of digital wills with instructions on what to do with their digital legacy. As part of the informational human body, digital remains are not merely regarded as property, but as something constitutive of one’s personhood¹⁶ In sum, the nascent digital afterlife industry is bound to navigate through delicate and somewhat uncharted ethical and even legal territory in the years to come.

It is important to bear in mind how our own digital footprints are based on traces left behind in our online lives. We are the future dead. How might our current online interactions shape our digital proxies and impact our significant others in our absence? Is there a danger of preserving too much of the dead and not letting go? With such developments in technology, the question is no longer what is possible, but rather what is permissible. The ubiquitous and mobile nature of the internet ensures that our everyday lives are extended by nature of the technical devices we use. We are not separate from our online personas; our digital bodies are now part of the self, in life and in death.