When I heard the Tech Won’t Save Us interview with author Tamara Kneese last September, I immediately put this book on my reading list for this year. Her conversation with Paris Marx on that podcast intrigued me with the many examples of how (as the subtitle says), technologically oriented problem-solving can never eliminate the scourge of death. Their discussion of how social media profiles of dead friends have a haunting quality confirmed that I would need to read this book. Having done so in a week that involves another kind of misunderstanding or misapplication of technology as it relates to death (i.e., Elon Musk’s profoundly mistaken idea that over three million dead centenarians are somehow collecting Social Security payments in the United States), I found many relevant ways to connect what Kneese discusses to many aspects of the world of the living.
In her first chapter, Kneese discusses how social media profiles have become shrines to the dead, but only after some effort by users. It was 2007’s Virginia Tech shooting that changed Facebook’s policy about automatically deleting the profiles of deceased users. Prior to that, the site, like many others, would remove such profiles once an admin could prove a user had passed. The initial form of this digital preservation was simply to allow the profiles to continue existing. Later developments meant that certain users could act as custodians for the profiles of the deceased; posting new content is not permitted, but accepting friend requests or changing profile pictures are allowed. This chapter reminded me of how the MySpace profiles of deceased friends were eventually overtaken with spam in the weeks and months after their deaths. What was once a socially mediated digital gathering space and tribute wall became an untenable mass of corrupted and confusing links due to some of the profiles of my deceased friends having been overtaken by bots. Kneese rightly points out that the creators of social media platforms do not begin building their sites with death in mind. Someone like Zuckerberg, who started Facebook as FaceMash while in college, was not thinking about mortality, but about the relative attractiveness of his collegiate peers (p. 40). So, it only makes sense that the site would struggle with how to grapple with the complexity of death in a social setting.
While some social media companies and other tech start-ups were not thinking of death at the beginning of their founding, others have made that calculation part of their business plan. Enter Legacy Locker, Eterni.me, and iCroak. These companies promise to be there for users when their time comes by offering the possibility of profile management after death. Everything from email to passwords to makeshift memorials can be part of a loved one’s digital legacy. You can also set up emails to be sent postmortem should you want to get in the last word in an argument with a company like DeathSwitch. (What thrilling pettiness!) But, as you might assume from either never having heard of these companies’ names before, or knowing them only in the past tense, the market for such sites is not stable or large enough to support potential users. In other words, the companies that promise eternal storage and management of a deceased user’s online traces have themselves gone defunct.
The third chapter works with the idea of “disrupted inheritance,” meaning the times when executing a will or trust is complicated by the involvement of technology. This can mean anything from not having access to the usernames and passwords of the deceased’s financial accounts to the possibility of life’s extension through chatbots or other technology that uses the voice or likeness of the deceased. This stuff, to use a technical term, is icky. I kind of understand the idea of wanting to live forever and to see what the future holds for humanity. But the reality of doing so through the technology that exists today means that someone has to be your digital caretaker. Kneese again returns to the limited perspective of the “straight cisgender white men with finance chops” who create digital preservation services (p. 134). The implication is that the kind of person who conceives of an idea like preserving a digital life after death probably has many assumptions about the kind of person who will do the preserving, which is likely not a straight cisgender white man.
In this chapter, I also had the nagging question of why anyone would really want a digital simulacrum of their loved one in the first place. It’s trite to say dying is part of life and that’s what makes it meaningful. Marcille from the manga Delicious in Dungeon comes to this realization (spoiler alert) when she becomes the dungeon master late in the narrative. She realizes that being able to outlive your loved ones because only you possess immortality is truly a curse. Having someone else maintain the digital version of you so you can do a compromised version of the same seems even worse.
Speaking of immortality, the fourth chapter addresses how the smart objects we leave behind can become untamable in our absence. Without regular use or maintenance, they can fall into ruin. Kneese describes a house full of such objects in Provo, Utah, that is meant to be fully self-sufficient for its guests. Of course, caretakers who do not take care will defeat the purpose of such a house, which is what happened when the owner let visitors rent it via AirBnB. The guests did not know how to operate the smart blinds when they stopped functioning, so they remained closed. So, even the property we leave behind as some kind of monument to our existence cannot function without someone else carefully maintaining it.
In the concluding chapter, Kneese reflects on the search for immortality in many of these forms and mentions the idea that some humans are eager to be like the ocean waves or mountain peaks, lasting well beyond “the collapse of civilization and catastrophic climate change” (p. 185). They want an immortality project—evidence that they lived and so will not be forgotten. This is a fool’s errand; these natural elements of Earth do, in fact, reflect evidence of humanity’s trace. How the waves and mountains have changed are evidence that we have lived, even as we destroy the planet. A book like Death Glitch is an immortality project itself, in that it provides a novel contribution to a field of study. Through these interviews, personal anecdotes, and histories of failed start-ups, Kneese has certainly guaranteed she will be remembered when her time comes.
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