Digital Identity & Death with Dr Patrick Stokes and Dr Elaine Kasket #8

Millions of profiles of the dead haunt the internet. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? What does it mean for the self now that digital technologies are transforming the notion of legacy, and in the future, how you will persist beyond your own death? Today I speak with Patrick Stokes, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. His work sits at the intersections of the continental and analytic traditions, with research interests that include personal identity, Narrative Selfhood, and Philosophy of Religion. And I'd urge you to catch his recent two-part series, What's New in Death, on ABC Radio in Australia. He's also the author of the book Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death. I'm also joined by Elaine Casket, a counseling psychologist, a speaker, and author. After a BA Honors in Journalism and Psychology, she pursued a career in psychology but never stopped writing. And her latest book is called "All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data." She hosts the Still Spoken podcast, which once again, please do check out. Now, the last chapter of my own book, "The Future of You," deals with exactly this topic and suggests the possibility that with digital technologies today, we are entering a future in which you will continue to exist in some form or another, even after your death. I took up this idea for BBC Radio 4's Forethought series in my episode entitled Virtually Immortal that aired last year. I'll pop a link in the show notes. But if you've heard it, you'll know why it's an area of identity that I'm very interested in. And so it was a real delight to cover so many aspects of this with these two expert guests. We discussed everything from what's technologically possible to what's tilically possible. The ambiguity that digital souls and the digital afterlife affords us, how we might be thinking or should be thinking of our own digital legacy, how we should be planning ahead, but maybe the reasons why we don't. And we talked about the notion of evolution. Is that even possible today, where the digital afterlife is sort of infecting the digital current life, and perhaps even the notion of nostalgia is dead. And we talked about the increasing need for some kind of regulatory framework, or at least a public policy initiative in this area, so that perhaps we can think about the kinds of rights that people will need in a new way. But let's move on and without further ado, speak to Elaine and Patrick at length about digital identity, and death. So Elaine and Patrick, welcome to The Future of You. Thank you so much for joining me. The audience might not know too much about the whole concept of online death. So I wonder if you could just explain what it is and how we should understand it, and also why we should be interested in it right now.

Sure, yeah. So in some ways, online death is just regular death with computers. It was inevitable, I guess, as we began to live more and more of our life in electronically mediated ways that we were going to end up dying on computers but also leaving things behind in online environments and in networked environments. And in many respects, a lot of what we do around death and the way in which death interacts with our online lives is just continuous with what there was before. But there are things that I think are quite new, and there are things that are amplified by the technology, by the fact that we can be present in so many places now and across such distance in ways that are not bounded by our physicality in quite the same way. I think that does change in some respects our relationship, particularly to the dead. So it's not so much about the way in which we die itself— presumably that hasn't changed on a biological level because of technology, not yet anyway, um, although it has in a sense of the way we define death, I guess. But the way in which we relate to the dead, I think, is where a lot of the changes seem to be occurring. The dead are now more visible than they used to be. They're more phenomenally persistent. That is to say that the dead are much more kind of salient in the world in which we operate now because they're just mixed in among everyone else in our online environments. They're not sequestered off in a graveyard the way they used to be. And so that, I think, is where there is some changes occurring. I think we should care about that firstly because it does change our relationship to the dead in terms of the way we remember the dead, the way we interact with the dead. It creates challenges in how we manage our online lives, how we manage our online legacies. And it also, I think, creates interesting vulnerabilities for the dead because the dead are now subject to forms of reuse that they maybe weren't in quite the same way in the past. And that creates some interesting sort of legal challenges, political challenges, and ethical challenges.

Yeah, I mean, I'd add to that. That's kind of the direction that I was wanting to talk about as well, because the digital remains have this continuity. They continue to be available. They're available, they're malleable, they're exploitable by any number of parties. And so people can puppeteer the dead, they can reanimate the dead, they can revoice the dead. And so a lot of the concerns that we understandably, justifiably have in our contemporary landscape about things like deepfakes, using artificial intelligence to present audio or video of something that might not have actually happened, fake news, how history as a general thing is remembered, and our belief in our ability to tell what actually happened and what didn't. All of these things are issues where conceivably, and this has already been done in several instances, the data of the dead or the digital remains have been taken and pulled into service for the agenda of the living, some kind of agenda. So sometimes that agenda is just personal, it's bereavement-oriented, somebody wants to, for example, create a chatbot of somebody that they loved and lost so that they can continue to feel like they have an interaction. Sometimes it's a much broader kind of phenomenon, like a director using a late celebrity's voice to create new audio for a documentary film, for example.

Yeah, I remember a few years ago, seeing, I think it was The Times did it. They took audio from JFK and many of his previous speeches. And then they, they worked very hard and it took a long time. They took all these, these clips and put it through AI and recreated the speech that he would have given in Dallas, uh, had he obviously, um, not been assassinated. And it was incredible. It was absolutely spine-chilling to listen to this. But of course, in listening to it, I realized halfway through it, it didn't actually happen. But I'm sure in the future people will like hear that and look back on it, and maybe future generations, and it will be assumed that it kind of did happen. It's a very strange thing. How are we to cope with that? How are we to manage this new phenomena in the world?

I suppose it depends very much on who you're talking about and what you mean by cope. Because there's obviously, as a psychologist, I think a lot about, you know, how we perceive things, how those perceptions influence how we think and feel. You know, and how we remain or don't remain grounded in reality and how this affects us, what reality means. But of course, there's also a huge host of practical and ethical and legal coping, regulatory coping questions. That sounds kind of boring, but it's actually extraordinarily important. And it's connected to everything that I just mentioned. There's a protection aspect where when we get to this, point where it's going to be increasingly hard to differentiate the dead from the living in a lot of spaces we encounter if they aren't clearly identified, if things that have been manipulated aren't clearly identified, then there could be all sorts of problems that are going to be inconvenient for a lot of people around identity impersonation or the ability for nefarious forces to drain somebody's estate before the loved ones can get the digital portion of the estate together. So I think part of what we need to cope is a very practical kind of question. I'll leave the more philosophical question to Bat. But I find myself very concerned often about where is all this headed and what kind of problems, both practical and emotional, is this going to cause for people when they've lost someone?

Yeah, I mean, I'd add to that too, that there's one good reason to be optimistic, which is that In the past, where we have had technologies that can actually, you know, produce a non-real image or a non-real, a simulacrum of reality, when we've had those technologies in the past, we've worked out pretty quickly how to differentiate what's real and what's not. So humans turn out to actually be quite effective at recognizing what's real and what's fake. On the other hand, and this is a reason to be a bit more pessimistic about this, we also have a tendency to become so embodied to our media that we see through it, right? The medium just becomes transparent and we stop noticing the mediated character of, you know, various forms of conversation. Over the last couple of years, with the fact that we've all moved to online communication most of the time through COVID, um, we've become perfectly used to talking to people through a screen. If we weren't before, and we already were kind of getting there, um, you don't notice so much that your conversation is mediated. You're just used to it because you're doing it every day. In the same way that, you know, people had to make the same sort of transition when the telephone phone first arose over 100 years ago. So it's quite likely that as, uh, reanimated versions of the dead start to become a more salient part of, um, our everyday experience, we'll just start to see through the mediation and we'll start to treat these things as if we're really just communicating with a dead person. So I, as I say, there are some grounds for optimism, but there's also grounds to be really quite concerned.

I had the rather extraordinary experience of seeing ABBA Voyage a couple of days ago. Which is the avatars that were created apparently by Abba Today, all of whom are still alive, but they're getting on up there. I don't think they would mind what I'm saying. They actually came out, the elder version avatars, to also take a bow at the end of the show just after you've been watching an hour and a half of the younger versions of them, which was quite jolting.

It was quite jarring.

But that wasn't actually a hologram. People dub it a hologram, but it's not. It's actually a very highly sophisticated, massively pixelated screen. But the avatars were created by the members of the band in these suits, motion capture suits. And seriously, if I hadn't known what I was seeing, I would have had no idea that they weren't there. Absolutely, literally no idea that they weren't there. To the extent that there was a live band also on stage. And as we were leaving, My 12-year-old daughter said, "But was the band there?" And I said, "I actually, I don't know. I had to look it up. I thought they were there, but then I no longer trusted my perception." When you saw the blown-up version, the large version of the singers, quote unquote, on stage, if they open their mouth, you could see their freaking fillings. You know, like it was just like you can't, you know. And I was really, I was watching the audience's response to this when it would sort of shift between the the avatars looking like they were on stage versus something that they sort of swapped between, which was more of a video, a pre-prepared, almost like a video, music video. I was watching how the energy of the crowd sort of shifted and came down and how it differed between when the live band did something and when the avatars were on stage. And it just felt like it was a room full of this sort of strange confusion where people sometimes were feeling something visceral, sometimes were feeling something— it was almost like I was seeing precisely the adjustments that Patrick is talking about, where people take a step in a particular direction, but sort of a hesitant step, but also someone that feels quite compelling. It was almost like I was seeing it playing out in front of me in this specially built ABBA Voyage arena. Now, that was one of the most expensive live music experiences, quote unquote live music experiences ever mounted, £175 million something. I don't remember whether it was pounds or dollars. And they're saying, but this is the future. This is the future of, you know, musical entertainment. And of course, it goes without saying that ABBA are still here, but after they're not, this could continue kind of being out in the world, giving— and this is also something that gives me pause— future generations the full ABBA experience. And that part is interesting because going back to what Patrick was saying at the beginning, when the dead stick around, when they are continuous, when they are revivified, when they are re-animated, and it's a very popular franchise or once very popular band. Once upon a time, those hugely popular things, the Star Wars franchise, which is partly still so popular today because of its sort of persistence and sort of like online, you know, Marilyn Monroe, ordinarily before the digital world, these things would have faded away to be replaced by new talents, new voices, whatever. And still, of course, those people come up. However, it's kind of interesting how the dead then are kind of continuing to be influential socially, culturally, etc., and possibly preventing types of evolution that might have otherwise been there.

It's a very interesting point, that is, and it makes me want to ask you the question, will this be the death of nostalgia?

Wow, that's an interesting question. I mean, I, I wonder how optimistic we should be that Elaine's right, that young artists and musicians will keep coming through, actually, if you've got that kind of structure in place where you just keep reusing the same kind of cultural signifiers over and over again. There's already a recognized problem where streaming services for things, for music, things like Spotify, because they're using an algorithm to serve up music that the algorithm thinks you'll like, that then creates an incentive not to do anything too new or original, but to sound like things that already exist, right? So it's like there are bands out there that just sound like Led Zeppelin because there's a whole bunch of people who like Led Zeppelin, and so they're going to get served up by the algorithm. So there's an interesting question there about if we then add dead artists in a visual medium or in a performing medium, like with ABBA, um, are we going to have the same problem writ even larger? In a sense, we're just going to keep recycling the same stuff over and over. So it may not be so much the, the death of nostalgia is the final victory of nostalgia over everything else.

I would just— it resonated so much with what Pat was saying because my daughter, who is 12, musically resides in the 1990s, like sort of roughly 1995 from what I can work out right now. And every single time she's singing along or she's got a band t-shirt, because band t-shirts from bands from decades ago are very big amongst the tween and teen crowd right now. And every time I say, where are you hearing this? She says TikTok, right? You know, and so, you know, a lot of the people that she's listening to are, because of Rock and Roll Lifestyle, actually dead. Some of them are not. But this is the thing. It's like, yeah, okay, back in the day, you'd have to, if you were a band, you might have, you might be influenced by your mom or your dad's stack of LPs or something like that. But now it's so accessible. The music, the culture, the events, whatever, the past. And it's going to be even more so because everything now is online already. So it's like, okay, so all of this stuff is going to be there. How is that going to influence how things evolve? And then that's the sort of dead clogging up the airwaves a little bit, but also sort of like, you know, kind of not necessarily making space for a different kind of generativity to produce some things quite new.

Yeah, I have exactly the same thing happening with our 13-year-old, actually, where it's like, yeah, there was stuff from the '70s that I picked up on from my parents' record collection that I was listening to at her age, and she's listening to the same stuff. You know, I walk in, she's listening to Fleetwood Mac, and I'm like, you're kidding, right? Like, are we ever going to move beyond that period if it's just going to keep, you know, reiterating itself over and over again?

That's interesting. We've heard a lot about the content, really, of the content that's going to be preserved, I guess, and what's that what that's going to bring about sort of psychologically and culturally. But are we responding to this in a way because we want it to happen? You know, when we see those avatars, for example, is it because we want to believe that they're real almost? Um, Patrick, you mentioned— I don't know if I've understood the concept right, but you talk about things being telically possible, um, in your book. I wonder if you can just expand on that a bit, um, and explain that because it's an interesting concept.

Sure, so it's a concept that I stole from David Oderberg, who's an Australian philosopher who's been at the University of Reading pretty much forever and uses it in a totally different concept. So sorry, David, if you're listening. But basically, something is teelically possible if it might as well be true. Alright, so if you are driving along in your car and you get— you ask your GPS for directions and it reads out directions to you, it's in a sense teelically possible there's a person on the other end with a map giving you directions because it might as well be the case. That that's happening, right? Um, there's no real difference in, in the actual experience itself. David's example is, you know, if you're on a battlefield and you get an order, um, it doesn't actually matter if the order came from the general or from the, um, lieutenant, because it's telepathically possible that it's from the general. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of an order, you just got to do it. So there's, there's that possibility that we might get so used to various forms of simulated communication from the dead that we start to see it as typically possible. Like, well, it might as well be them. This message might as well be them. There's an interesting thing of, at some point, is it like, okay, if I'm going to go along to see this, it's— it might as well be ABBA, so I might as well just go and do it. And of course, there's a whole series of these, like, you know, um, concerts that have been staged with, you know, um, Whitney Houston and, um, Buddy Holly and Maria Callas. These have been done, um, not with quite the same technology. What they've used for those is a modern version of the Pepper's Ghost illusion, which is actually 19th century stage technology. But yeah, again, I think if people are going to that, there is this sense in which they're taking it as telically possible that it's really ABBA, or it's really Whitney Houston, or it's really Buddy Holly, despite the fact that the latter two I just mentioned have been dead for a long time. Because it's the next best thing, and at some point being the next best thing easily slides into being the same sort of thing. It's, you know, what Robert Nozick called the closest continuer.

Well, what's so interesting about the kind of ABBA situation, I mean, the amount of money, like they put you in a situation with so many contextual cues, you know, this kind of like, I'm at a concert and I'm in a really good concert, you know, here's the stadium, here's the lights coming down, here's— and all the things that you're accustomed to experiencing when you're seeing an actual band, they're present and accounted for. So in terms of the neuronal chains in your brain that prime you to expect something is really going to happen, those things are there. But in terms of the things being telepathically possible, and experienced is actually the thing. I was thinking about that on a neurological level too, because I was thinking about, for example, those parts of the brain that are activated when you're having a dream, and the brain not necessarily differentiating between dreaming experience and waking experience, or the fact that when we have a really transformative, deep conversation, with somebody that we love and somebody that we trust, the brain produces oxytocin. There was a lot made of that during the pandemic when we couldn't be close to people because oxytocin is also reductionistically known as the cuddle hormone, and we have this feeling like we need to be in physical co-proximity with somebody to produce it. But when it's been— studies have shown by oxytocin researchers that when we communicate online with somebody in an electronically technologically mediated way, If it's the right good feeling kind of bonding conversation or the transformational deep conversation with somebody that you love and trust, oxytocin is also produced in the same way. The brain does not know the difference between— it doesn't care that that conversation is taking place in a technologically mediated way versus— so that has obvious, if you are able to produce a sufficiently persuasive convincing illusion of having an actual conversation with somebody that you've loved and lost, then you can extrapolate from that to sort of say, okay, if it feels telepathically possible, if there is that suspension of disbelief that's made partially possible by that technology being so good, well, the brain then doesn't know the difference. And then that does take you into pretty interesting territory if it becomes a widespread phenomenon.

I mean, it's also just really fascinating questions about the signifiers of authenticity in that sort of environment too, right? I mean, if you go back to, the early '90s when there was a spate of singers who were caught lip-syncing in various contexts. Like, you know, of course it was the Milli Vanilli scandal, and you know, there were others as well. Like, you know, people would drop the mic and they keep singing and they get booed off stage, right? There's a whole— I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering, maybe there's only one or two, but it's— when I was a kid, it seemed to be happening pretty regularly in the very early '90s. And that's kind of fascinating in the sense that there's a defeated expectation of authenticity that really infuriates people. When that's frustrated. Whereas on the other hand, I wonder what would happen if the avatars froze up and if, you know, somebody, you know, somebody comes out on stage and says, "Sorry, just bear with us folks, we have to reboot the avatars." I'm really interested to know that if you're going to get the same kind of affronted sense of something's authenticity being broken or the spell being broken in that way, or if the assumption is just, "Yeah, well, of course, it's just a simulacrum." I don't know.

Well, that happened. I experienced that and saw that in the audience because it happened in the sense that there they were on stage and then suddenly something flipped around. And because I didn't know it was a screen while I was watching it, I only found that out after. I didn't know what I was seeing. But when it flipped around into the more music video cut type of mode, I found that like it felt like a betrayal. It felt like the same, almost as though the spell was broken for me at that moment when they would do that switch. And you could see from the energy in the room that the spell had been broken for a lot of other people as well. There wasn't pitchforks and torches, but there was a drop in the energy.

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, in philosophy, I mean, Heidegger talks about this notion of things being ready to hand, right? Where you don't even notice it. So you pick up your hammer and you use your hammer to nail things in, and you don't even really notice the hammer. Feel the hammer so much, you know, you just— it's almost an extension of your body until the hammer breaks, and then suddenly you're reminded that it's there, that it's a tool, and it sort of reasserts itself as a sort of a physical object. In the same kind of way, I mean, it may be that part of what we need, if we're not going to get lulled into believing that, you know, reanimations of the dead or simulacrums of the dead are the real thing, is we need glitches. We need glitches to occur to sort of break that spell, to take us out of the sense of the ready-to-handness of these things, to remind us of, "Oh, hang on, that's not actually my great-grandmother. She's dead." You know, so maybe that's— actually getting that built in, I think, would be extremely hard to do.

Yeah, like an uncanny valley, but for, yeah, for holograms and avatars.

But ethically, I mean, when a couple years ago now, there was a family heritage website a site that was using machine learning to produce very brief animations. You could submit an old black and white or sepia tone photograph of your grandparents, and then they would use this learning to kind of give a few, you know, moments of movement. And one of the things they were very keen to sort of say is that we have an indelible watermark type thing on this to show that it's something that has been produced. And I feel like whether it's a glitch, or whether it's something that is quite indelible and obvious, that is attached to things that have been manipulated like that, I just think that that's extremely important, because I think that the potential, the sort of negative potential for that not being the case is just extremely high. And it could be the kind of JFK thing that you were talking about, you know, that might be benign, like, oh, great, you know, but there are lots of non-benign things that could be created that could have quite negative social and historical effects if they were allowed to be perceived as real in later years.

Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting example too, because it was, um, incredibly impressive technology. Like, it looked really good, it looked really seamless, but every time I put an historical figure into it and I saw the, the way the face moved, I just had this visceral reaction of, nah, that's not right. So I mean, I did my PhD on a guy called Søren Kierkegaard who died in 1855. I put a picture of Kierkegaard on there. Admittedly, it's a drawing, it's not a photo, but I remember looking at it going, no, that's not quite right. And I've, um, they've put a couple of other historical photos in and it just— something about it, I don't know, I was just really conscious of the, the recreated aspect of it.

Wait, Pat, just wait.

Well, that's it. It could be because it's such a new technology, and then when, you know, 10, 15 years from now and you're used to it, you just may not even make the distinction anymore. It might not be so much that you're fooled as you just don't even bother not to be fooled anymore.

Well, the trajectory that these technologies follow, of course, is that they go from the really inexpensive, really expensive, only accessible to a privileged few, abba voyage level, you know, kind of Industrial Light and Magic level. And then as time goes on, the same technologies trickle down, they become more accessible to the general public, they get fed into things that people, regular people are able to use. And then meanwhile, there's more impressive technologies at the top of the heap again. And so if what I saw a couple of days ago on stage, you know, is any indication of what's going to be available to us in a decade's time, then as far as I'm concerned, we've got stuff to worry about.

Yeah, I mean, it's exactly what happened to deepfakes, right? I mean, you know, it went from being a technology that only extremely well-heeled Hollywood studios had access to, to something that anyone had access to. And of course, immediately it started being used for bad purposes.

Yeah, you know, at the re:MARS gathering in this last summer, Amazon's re:MARS gathering where they roll out, they have a, you know, the stage and the keynote speakers and the chief scientist at Amazon was talking about the deep learning and the machine learning that goes into Alexa and how Alexa needed to have a response for every moment and how a lot of Alexa's responses Kids are proactive now, which I found a little bit like, you know, maybe not quite as ambiently listening as I would like. And so the capper on that talk was this very emotive video of the young boy, and there he is, and he says, "Alexa, can Grandma read me The Wizard of Oz?" And then Alexa says, "Okay." And then following that, the grandmother's voice issues from the thing reading The Wizard of Oz. Sort of bittersweet, sort of sad-happy smile that sweeps over the boy's face. And because of the introduction about being about COVID-19 and everything that we've lost, it's never explicitly said, but you know that the grandmother is dead. The grandmother is dead. And they said very proudly, because of some workaround that they did, it took less than 1 minute of recorded audio from this deceased woman to produce this. So that they only need a little tiny thing to feed this program with for then the grandmother to go off and read The Wizard of Oz. And there wasn't anything else that hit the headlines about that particular Reimar's presentation, but that did because the journalists were immediately like looking for all the synonyms for creepy in their thesaurus and, you know, and calling people like me and Pat about it, you know. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if this were not something that on an individual sort of level, you know, we, you know, came to happen quite a lot, you know, in future years. So that's not to say that there's not applications of the technology that people might really value and cherish. You know, I don't dispute that. If that is something that is good for someone, that's something that they really, that they really care about and like, there's nothing wrong with that. From a psychological perspective, that's fine. I want to emphasize that. A lot of, you know, people will say, oh, but doesn't this do something to— it's not about that. You know, if somebody wants their deceased grandmother to read them The Wizard of Oz, fine. But I guess I'm just— it's the slippery slope thing again, where I'm just so aware of the lack of regulation in this area and the lack of kind of thinking about regulation in this area.

Yeah, I mean, there's something essential to the fact that that's— you describe that as bittersweet. Right, that— and what worries me about that example is what happens when the bitterness is gone because you've lost that ambiguous character of the dead, that they're there and not there, that it's Grandma's voice but it's also not Grandma's voice because Grandma's dead. Um, you know, that ambiguity is, is kind of how we encounter the dead, and, and that's fine and, and valuable. My worry is what happens when half that ambiguity slips out of there because you're so used to Grandma's voice reading your stuff through Alexa. That you kind of forget that she's dead.

Can we switch to, um, just having a, um, a little chat about some of the decisions that people are going to have to make about how they would like their identity portrayed after their physical death? Because you're touching on it there, Elaine, and I was thinking about the ABBA example. You know, in the UK there was, um, quite a bit of criticism in the press of the imagery that ABBA had chosen there was a criticism of ageism. Oh, why aren't they on stage performing, you know, as the age they are, for example? They've chosen much younger avatars, you know. Is that a problem culturally, and why is this? And it, you know, it perhaps makes us think, you know, why did they choose those specific images of that specific time, of those specific ages, you know? How are we going to choose if we do get to choose, how we portray ourselves beyond physical death? And can that change over time? Or is that going to be kind of fixed in this digital afterlife? You know, I'm quite interested in who's making these decisions and should we be thinking about them now? And what are the options open to us?

With ABBA, apparently it isn't the end of nostalgia because it was definitely a very much a sort of a '70s sort of throwback. And a lot of the audience members came dressed in this sort of good garb. It's like, you know, we couldn't be there back in this time that we fantasized about, but now we can. We can sort of place ourselves back in this time, and it was a kind of like dressing up, kind of play acting kind of thing, kind of time travel thing, which I think appealed to people. But yeah, it's such an interesting question, because most of the time with respect to the Day of the Dead, because where people are dying and they're not designing something to carry on after they're not physically there anymore, It's either happening by default, or people are taking what they want to take of the data of the dead, and they're making something of it according to their own purposes. And so at the moment, we're not at a place where the vast majority of people, while they're still alive, are making these kinds of planning decisions. There's been so many digital legacy services that have, like, come up, and most of them have also kind of gone away, with the idea that people are going to want to make these kinds of, um, advanced plans for how they would like to carry on after death. There's not a whole lot of uptake on those kinds of things. I think people find it very difficult to wrap their heads around, like, how am I going to want to appear, interact? What am I going to say? Here I am, I want to record a video for somebody 20 years hence, my daughter 20 years hence. And because they can't put their minds in that place, they just— it falls all kind of flat and they don't do it. So yeah, right now it's not something that people, when they're alive, are choosing very much. It's being chosen for them after death when it does happen.

Yeah, it's interesting when we talk about death, there's a real bias towards how things were at the end. So for instance, when we talk about carrying out people's wishes or what someone would have wanted, or if we talk about interests that we might frustrate after they die, it's always the last interests that seem to matter. It's always the last kind kind of preferences they held that seem to matter. And philosophers who work on this topic are always like, yeah, we don't know why, but there seems to be some particular reason why that matters more than anything else. Whereas if you look at things like 19th century spiritualist accounts of what the afterlife was like, and they had the incredible privilege of more or less creating an afterlife out of whole cloth, right? They could more or less— I mean, they did in fact pick up bits from existing Christian eschatology and other sources as well and put it all together. But, um, it's interesting, you'll see comments in there like, oh, in the afterlife everyone gets to more or less choose what age they want to appear as. They tend to choose somewhere in their like 30s or early 40s or late 20s. They tend to sort of, you know, find that as their best time in life, and that's what they choose to, to present themselves as. So there's an interesting question as this technology evolves from something you've recorded presumably as you're facing death, and so probably late in life. As it evolves, it's interesting to wonder whether people will start to go down the avatar route instead and say, well, I want to look like I did you know, in my glory years, whenever that happens to have been. So there's an interesting sort of question there, but then again we come back to questions of authenticity, right? That if you put up a really old profile picture of yourself in social media, people will think you're being inauthentic, that you're not actually presenting what you actually look like now. So there's an interesting kind of tension there, I think, that, you know, we do want people to look as they look now, we think they're doing something inauthentic if they don't, But once we're used to the fact that it's an avatar of a dead person, we might get used to the idea that it can look like any stage in life, more like that kind of spiritualist afterlife scenario.

Because it's not just what people look like, is it? It's also their opinions. So if we look at some of these social media sites, they're saying, well, actually, it doesn't matter what the platform is, but we can preserve your points of view and we can post on your behalf even though you're gone, sort of thing. But actually, as we've seen even in the last few years, there's a kind of, you know, a moral judgment which might apply today that didn't apply in the past, but now we're trying to apply it to the past and some of these opinions that we held might be out of date. How on earth does one think about curating that going forward if one's not here physically to manage it, but you're kind of assuming that somebody will do it on your behalf, but maybe they won't?

What that makes me think of is, I read several stories about this, but particularly a good one in The New York Times, about people who were in life COVID deniers, kind of anti-vax COVID deniers who may have put a ring around their profile picture on Facebook to attest to their views, who might have been quite vocal about it, and then who subsequently contracted COVID and died. And who may indeed, some of these folks had changes of heart, understandably, on their, you know, as they were progressing towards their ultimate deaths. And then there was this phenomenon of calling out and shaming people posthumously on social media or in person, you know, towards their families for the role they played in, you know, social harms or whatever, for having certain views at a particular time. And so that's an example of how obviously those people's views evolved as a result of their experiences, but then they're getting fixed and also then shamed for a fixed, you know, kind of position in life. And that's inaccurate, you know. So basically, people, you know, kind of trolls and haters online are picking a particular snapshot moment, you know, from their social media. And this is a very important point in life in general about And of course, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Oxford Internet Institute has made this point in his fantastic book called Delete, which is the virtue of forgetting in the digital age. And Viktor talks about how, you know, this kind of evolution that we used to be able to have as people was partly facilitated by societies and everybody's forgetting, you know, that you could change and shift or whatever because it was impossible to leave previous iterations of yourself behind. But the internet remembers. And so hence now we have all of these scandals like, oh, look what I've detected in this politician's or this actor's or whatever social media from 15 years ago. And people are being held to account for those previous iterations of themselves. And so all the kind of little deaths of ourselves that kind of go through, you know, like, as we don't We don't have those anymore, where there's a lot of continuity. And then that continuity continues into death, but individual stakeholders can pick and choose from amongst all those different identities to suit their purposes. And it's all there. It's a smorgasbord.

It is, yeah. Victor's book is great. And I think one thing that the internet really does show up is that a huge amount of what we think of as forgiveness really is just forgetting, right? It really is just that stuff just slips out of view. And of course, the internet just won't let that happen. And not only will it not let it happen, It also de-narrativizes everything, right? Every moment in time is notionally at least the same number of clicks away. It has certain ways of kind of restaging the narration. So, yeah, like with a profile, you have to kind of scroll down and so on. But in theory, everything is kind of all the same distance away. It's all like one click away or, you know, a small number of clicks away. Um, and so not only does that mean that you can be canceled for things you thought 30 years ago or, you know, 10 years ago that you don't think now, it also means that the very notion of evolution is kind of lost because how you get from A to B is lost, right? There's just A and there's just B and an infinite number of points in between, all of which are equally accessible. So it really does volatilize a lot of our senses of the way people exist over time and the sort of allowances we have to make for that. But also just, yeah, as I say, the fact that you can't forget stuff anymore because it's all kind of there. Or it can't be forgotten, rather, that does make a difference to how we engage with other people. Hence things like, you know, the right to be forgotten case, you know, that we had this, you know, that's now been enshrined in European law. This idea there's a right to be forgotten, which is kind of inherently paradoxical. If you've got a right to be forgotten, that entails a corresponding duty to forget, but you can't forget voluntarily. So how do you— well, you can, it involves a lot of vodka, but I mean, how do you actually kind of carry out a duty to forget someone? So there's all sorts of really fascinating volatilizations to how time and memory operate that are kind of going on in this stuff.

And it's a right to ask to be forgotten. It's not like you have a kind of in situ right to be forgotten. It's like, you know, it's— you have to opt into being forgotten rather than opting out of being kind of remembered. The right to be forgotten, well, that might be your legal right in the public sphere online, but thinking about all sorts of different facets of identity as well and the version of us that gets remembered, as you were asking about, Tracey. I'm kind of thinking about the experience of people who are left behind when somebody dies. And now, of course, Apple has introduced a device-level legacy contact thing so that if somebody is nominated, they can get onto the iPhone and they can look at various things and it can open up all sorts of information about the person that you did not know before, because of course, We're such multifaceted human beings and we look at the websites that we look at or we search for the things that we search for. We have the communications that we have and we don't give everyone, including our nearest and dearest, a full and frank account of all of those things. But if they do have or if they do get access to this sort of treasure trove of archived— those listening cannot see Tracey's face. Tracey's face is contorting in a strange way. And so then here you are, the flesh and blood person is gone, there is no opportunity for dialogue, there's no opportunity for questions and answers, there's no opportunity for healing if healing is required, and you're sitting with what might be a lot of ambiguous information as well, that you don't really know whether it means something, etc. And then there you are, making up a narrative, or revising a narrative that you had of that person, and not really knowing what to do with what it is that you've discovered that's disrupted a comfortable biography that you might have had, not just of that person, but of the relationship that you and that person had. And so I think there's a lot of that, especially as companies, platforms, devices make in what is some ways needed, a kind of a move towards helping people practically settle an estate, or get to family photographs that the deceased person was the primary holder of, etc. And that's, you know, that does cause people a lot of pain when those things can't be done. However, from not just a privacy and dignity perspective of the deceased person, but also just the emotional sort of experience of the person doing the searching, there's a blessing and a curse, double-edged sword situation very definitely happening there. So, as the devices get more accessible to loved ones who've been nominated as contacts, that's going to maybe be a little bit consequential for how we remember people, and the biographies will get more complicated.

Can we just talk a little bit about the potential for therapy with this? I'm sure you have seen the Korean Times documentary, Meeting You, which obviously is moving on from sort of social media and avatars and whatever, and utilizing an immersive media environment, like virtual reality, to bring back the dead, let's say, a digital version, resurrecting them so that they can meet the people that they've left behind. So obviously in this case, for listeners who haven't seen it, a bereaved mother is reconciled with her daughter who had tragically died at about the age of 7 very suddenly. And of course she's never had the chance to say what she'd wanted to say, and she was given this option in some, in some sense to meet up with her daughter in virtual reality. And I'm sure anybody who's seen it finds it incredibly like touching. But what do we think of it from a therapeutic or psychological point of view, Elaine?

I want to add spiritual to that, um, and I haven't had a chance to speak to an actual Korean person about this, but from my reading and understanding, um, there is a set ritual within Korean society that used to be and still is carried out usually with a shaman in the temple where if somebody died before their time or died away from home both of which was the case with this young girl, there's a ceremony that's enacted to help the spirit move on. And in that video, there's this whole kind of process by which she then sort of turns into a butterfly at the end and flies away. And there's this thing that's happened. And I'm wondering whether there's, in this case, spiritual dimensions as well in terms of that functionally. I still don't know what kind of program that was, whether it was meant to be a documentary, whether it was meant to be a sort of a therapeutic therapeutic reality TV. I'm not quite sure what its intended functions were. But it's interesting, there are a lot more these days general applications of virtual reality for all sorts of emotional and psychological distress, for post-traumatic stress disorder, for social anxiety. So there's a whole developing trench of therapies that are happening that, that are wanting to use VR, particularly as VR becomes more accessible. One of the things that I'm wary of in even saying that though, is that people sort of classify grief, which is a normative common human experience as a mental health difficulty, or as a problem to be solved, or as something that needs to be healed or cured. And I don't want to get pulled into the vocabulary of moving on, or getting past something, when that's a misunderstanding, an outmoded understanding of how grief actually works. So what I would say is, is that grief is not that problem to be solved, that we have continuing bonds and connections to the people that we've lost throughout our lives in ways that don't follow any set pattern, the stage models of grief aren't really where it's at. And at the same time, some people in their individual bereavement may wish to or opt to have the kind of experience, if it's available to them, where they do have a conversation they want to have. How effective or how valuable or how meaningful that conversation is largely depends on that person's positioning in that person's context. It was so interesting about that video you mentioned, because on one hand, it was really moving. But there was also a bit of an outcry. People said, this is wrong, and this is not good. And this is creepy. And this is bad. But meanwhile, the mother in question, question on her blog was saying, "This really helped me." We are not in the position to, do not have the right to dispute that person's experience or question that person's experience that she describes herself as having. If it helped her, as she said it did, end of conversation. There's not a place for commentary from outside on that. So this kind of technology should never be imposed on somebody. The way it was imposed in that famous Black Mirror episode about the person whose boyfriend was reconstituted after his death as the chatbot, and then something a bit more extreme. And in that, she didn't want to use the service, and her friend sent it to her and kept on telling her, "You should do this. It helped me, it'll help you. You should do this. You should do this." So, I guess that what I would say psychologically and therapeutically is that we should never impose or expect something to help somebody else, and if it does help somebody else, we shouldn't question it.

Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the Korean video is that it was kind of staged, and it was meant to be an event. It was meant to be a sort of a more or less self-contained event. As I say, Nayeon, the girl, flies off at the end. She turns into a sort of butterfly and disappears. There's kind of a definite narrative around closure, and she says to her mother, "I'm not sick anymore." So there's this kind of, you know, staged sort of narrative to it, and she's not interactive, right? I mean, she asks a lot of questions, but if you notice, she never actually answers anything that's put to her directly. And that's fine, that's just what the technology is. But in that sense, I think it's going to be quite different to things like reanimating people's social media profiles in a way that's meant to be ongoing, in a way that you can just sort of dip in and out of. Now again, it may well be that people can find useful things in life, and the people who are going through grief do find something useful in that process. And, you know, Elaine's right, if it helps you, it helps you. And, you know, hang anyone else who tells you otherwise. But I mean, the question is the way in which those kind of technologies on a sort of society-wide level might change our relationship to the dead. The concern that I've raised, my colleague Adam Buben has raised, and others have raised, is that there's a potential there for not simply remembering the dead, not engaging with them as a dead loved one to whom we continue to have these ongoing bonds and connections, but actually just replacing them, actually saying, okay, the person is gone, but I can have the same kind of chat that I had with her while she was alive through this avatar. And again, I think that comes down to this transparency of media, that, you know, if we get to a point where we're so used to this media, it's become such a banal part of everyday life that we don't— just don't even notice that we're interacting with a dead person. Or more accurately interacting with the simulacrum of a dead person. That, I think, is where there is a kind of moral risk of not only treating the dead as a resource for us to use, but also kind of disrespecting the living by kind of implying that, you know, when you're gone, I can replace you with an app. You know, there's something— there's something about that that somehow, you know, um, is demeaning to our relationships if it's just a set of functions that can be carried out just as well buy a computer one day.

And they can keep working for cheap labor. So talk about dead labor, uh, you know, um, there was a Concordia University incident, uh, during the pandemic. All of us are being asked to capture our lectures, record our lectures. Pat and I talked about this, a Dead Professor Society episode of my podcast. And, you know, and so in Concordia University, the student discovered that the art history professor he'd been receiving lessons from term had died the previous year. They had been just rolling out his video lectures. And so imagine a touch of deepfake and AI and all that kind of stuff so that then the professor can actually answer the students' questions, which this particular professor couldn't do with the technology being deployed there. He was just appearing on video. But, you know, if we add in some of the things we've been talking about, and it's then possible for the, yeah, the pupils to sort of ask and receive this person's wisdom, I mean, again, about the squeezing other people out, I mean, if you can hire, you know, if you have a choice between a cheap AI lecturer and a flesh and blood person who needs a job or who's coming up in the academic world, what you're going to choose? And there's lots, I've been on those committees, I know which people often choose, the cheaper option, you know. So, that's really fascinating. Again, a shame because then where is the evolution? You know, where is the diversity of voices? What perspectives get fixed? What values get enshrined? What existing inequalities get perpetuated? You know, which are the positive influences that get maintained and which are the negative ones? And so there's lots of considerations there that I think we should also be worried about, as well as environmental. If we start creating en masse artificially intelligent entities based on formerly alive people, I mean, do you know how much carbon emissions is, you know, kind of by training an AI. I mean, it's massive. We're already cooling down the servers stuffed full of mostly inconsequential data of the deceased on the world servers. I mean, but yet if we cull deceased people's information, who decides who we keep and who we jettison? There's an ethical issue in and of itself. And so we should be careful about our environmental climate crisis we're currently in before we start fanning hypnotizing about how great it would be to have an AI of every dead person for some unspecified purpose.

Yeah, who do we keep in the digital graveyard? That's very— I hadn't thought about that. This is a fascinating discussion. I could chat to you all day about it. But we're coming to the end of our time together. And I wondered if I could just ask each of you, obviously, everything we've talked about today, and this area that you're working in, if we think about the self and identity, and for each of us that are still alive and around now today, What should we be thinking about? What action would you like to see people take to perhaps mitigate some of the problems that we've— or issues that we've been discussing and perhaps put us on the right track as you might see it going forward into this area that's obviously emerging? So what would be your actions for identity?

I would say on a sort of legislative level, actually, on the sort of level of public policy, I think that a lot of our existing assumptions about the sort of online legacies that we leave behind need to shift from thinking of them as property to thinking of them as something that genuinely is more like human remains, which is a really counterintuitive thing to say. But I think that the way in which we're constituted by our data, or the way in which our identity is presented by or invested in our data, simply isn't captured by a lot of our existing ways of thinking about online legacies as a kind of property that you can inherit or that you can leave from one person to the next. I think that the talk of digital remains that is kind of standard in the academic literature, I would really like to see that become a much more widely embedded part of how we think about these issues on, again, on a public policy level and even just on an everyday level. Because even though it is kind of counterintuitive to think of this stuff as analogous to, to dead bodies, uh, it does actually capture a lot of what's going on in the way in which we treat bodies. Um, it has a certain kind of respect to it, has a certain kind of concern to it, and also has a sense of stewardship rather than ownership, right? You don't really inherit somebody's corpse, you just have a kind of obligation almost to make sure that it's stewarded through to the next stage., you know, to the last stage of its existence in a way that's ethically appropriate to that person. That's something I'd really like to see. I'd like to see a shift in the way in which law reform bodies and parliaments and others think about these issues by thinking of them more in terms of data as identity constituting rather than just property.

I couldn't agree more with what Pat is saying. At the same time, I think it's also very important in developing public policy to consider whose rights might be compromised by conferring persistence rights or legal personality rights posthumously on digital remains. Who is going to be disadvantaged by conferring the privilege and advantage of persistence, or maybe even identity, on somebody who is no longer here in flesh and blood? Because we need to continue to be concerned with flesh and blood humans who are still occupying this physical planet. And if there are people whose rights are compromised, or people are disadvantaged by these kinds of persistences, then that needs to be taken into consideration in developing public policy.

That's an amazing point to end on. Thank you so much to both of you for spending the time with me. I think this digital recording will hopefully live on beyond our meeting. And thank you so much again. Thank you for listening to The Future of You podcast hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Also visit thefutureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity. Tina Digital World and visit futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast is edited by Big Tent Media and produced by Emily Crosby Media.