Book Review: Death Glitch - How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese

What happens after we die? All dogs go to heaven, but all data eventually gets corrupted.

Most online services are designed for the "happy path". Users never change name, gender remains fixed, spouses never divorce, and customers live forever. The real world is a tad more complicated. As the book puts it:

When death occurs for users and platforms, it becomes a kind of glitch that reveals needs that designers did not originally consider.

This is an exploration of what happens to our digital remains after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Did you know that graves are regularly re-used? The plot your dear old granny is buried in, will one day make room for someone else's beloved. The same is true on the Internet.

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.

It is worth noting that this is an academic book. It is rather heavy on the (Marxist) theory and a little unforgiving to the casual reader.

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.”

Death is hard work for all involved. Do you want your loved ones to be burdened with the admin of keeping your domain active? Do they really want the hassle of sorting through your MP3s? Does anyone care about your custom Netflix algorithm?

One of the hardest things I had to do recently was "unfriend" someone who had died. The platform didn't have a "memorial" option, and I kept being suggested to reconnect with someone who was uncontactable without a Ouija Board. The book points out how Facebook and other platforms evolved to support the death of their users - even though the platforms were sometimes reluctant in the face of hostility from the living.

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.

These are secular problems which remain unsolved. They cannot be solved by the current cultural hegemon:

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.

The author also directly attacks me:

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.

Harsh but fair!

I could quote endlessly from this book. It points out how digital devices become haunted objects, as our last wishes cascade through endless algorithms, how we don't control digital products in the same way as we do the physical, and how it is our duty to die responsibly.

It is a little heavy on the Marxist discourse but, to be fair, the right-wing are incapable of writing anything academic - so the free market has prevailed and delivers us Socialist dreams.

The only question I have left to ask is: who gets my ringtones when I die?