A few weeks before we even broached the subject of the digital afterlife industry in class, I was conceptualizing what it might look like for my haunted media project. In short, I wanted to investigate what a company looking to “[capitalize on] digital remains” might look like, while producing new questions and implications from the creative process (Öhman & Floridi, 3). Enter What Will You Leave, my version of a digital will start-up in the near future.
In this imagined world, What Will You Leave puts the management of digital assets into the consumer’s hands. Through a simple online portal, WWYL provides everyone the chance to bequeath their own digital inheritance to their family and loved ones. The business model is as follows: before a person passes away, they upload whatever content (such as social media accounts, playlists, photo albums, etc) they want in their digital will and specify who it will go to, much like the process of creating a traditional will. Then, when the person dies, the company sends a postcard to the inheritor with a QR code they can scan to access whatever their loved one left for them. Additionally, a the bottom of each postcard, recipients are invited to create their own digital will through the company website.
After conceptualizing this fake company, my project turned toward fleshing out the narrative behind each of the three postcards I created on the free graphic design software, Canva.
I ended up producing three postcard recipients, a teenaged boy who lost his grandparents, a college student who lost her younger sister, and a young man who lost his older brother. The QR codes on each postcard lead to whatever each of the deceased characters chose to bestow upon their family members.
One QR code sends users to a fictional ‘finsta’ page created by Jodie, a tween who died of cancer. Another links to a Twitter bot that ‘resurrects’ a highly opinionated and contentious older brother named Levi. Lastly, one unique QR code (provided by Spotify’s own QR creator) grants access to a playlist of songs as well as an old voicemail left by two grandparents.
Initially, I wanted to design a company website with WordPress as well. This page would host ‘user reviews’ of the service, as well as provide more info on the company through an about page. Unfortunately technological difficulties on the back-end of Davidson Domains made that unfeasible, but I found a work around. Because I wanted to generate as much paratext and ‘believability’ surrounding the project as possible, I made an Instagram page for the company. In addition to a short bio about the company, each user review has been uploaded there as a graphic.
If I were to do this project again, I would have liked to create even more postcards and narratives behind them to better highlight the potential ubiquity of this company in the digital afterlife industry. Although I believe I achieved a well-rounded demo with the initial three, I recognize how expansive the digital realm is, and think there are many more interesting things that could potentially make their way into a digital will. While testing the QR codes, I also noticed discrepancies between the mobile and desktop version of the Spotify playlist. On the mobile version, the grandmother’s voicemail isn’t available (possibly because the file is only hosted on my desktop), and the playlist description isn’t accessible. This isn’t ideal, because the QR code is only scannable on mobile, leaving out valuable paratext. If I could go back, I would like to try and rework my idea for a playlist on another platform like Apple Music.
In thinking about how to situate this project within the context of our class materials, Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi’s “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry” immediately comes to mind. The framework of What Will You Leave combines what Öhman and Floridi categorize as “information management services” and “online memorial services” (2). WWYL eases “digital asset management” by encouraging users to be specific in what they decide to leave behind. Additionally, the service bridges the gap between the departed and the living by providing a digital space for “a deceased individual or group to be mourned and/or remembered” (2).
Unlike the “unanticipated memorial spaces” platforms like Facebook have given rise to, What Will You Leave’s model is about creating fully anticipated spaces for grief and remembrance (Brubaker, Jed R., et al, 163). Regardless whether or not recipients know they are receiving a digital will, once they have access to it, the contents stay in their compartmentalized place, ready to be engaged with whenever one is willing and ready. This model also helps to facilitate the kind of “continuing bonds” Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish describe, in opposition to the typical ‘let-go’ approach to grief (153). By maintaining that compartmentalized space, whatever bond the living had with the deceased becomes revitalized, dynamic, and somewhat ongoing.
In her article, “Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society”, Deborah J. Basset introduces the concept of “digital zombies”, beings who are physically dead but virtually ‘alive’, and “crucially still being socially active” (1134).
The Tupac hologram is one example of a “digital zombie”.
She even notes an example of QR codes on tombstones as an example of digital zombification. In this particular example, the QR codes are interactive, allowing users to ‘engage’ with the dead; in other words, they contain “data [that] can be amended and added to by whomever has control of the site, thus enabling the deceased to be socially active” (1134-1135). Although Basset makes the case for the very real phenomena of so-called “digital zombies”, I don’t believe my project can be said to generate them. A QR code recipient could potentially reanimate the deceased if they were left log-in information, but the true purpose of the digital wills is to create a closed memorial space with no level of interactivity.
An earlier piece by Öhman and Floridi further discuss the implications of the digital afterlife industry through engaging with the idea of “informational bodies” (655). According to Floridi, “one’s personal identity…is to be understood as an informational structure; a narrative constituted by everything that defines it” (655). This understanding, as proposed by the authors, should provide an ethical foundation for the treatment of digital remains. From this perspective, “commercial alterations of the digital remains of the dead can and should be seen as an illicit infringement on human dignity” (656). While this imagined company would have an “economic incentive” to aggregate and disseminate these digital remains, doing so would not infringe upon the ‘accuracy’ of the information contained within, leaving me to wonder if WWYL could then be considered a ‘humane’ enterprise.
In conclusion, this project was a great foray into thinking about the future of the digital afterlife industry and what happens to the digital remains it relies on. Creating the narratives behind each postcard additionally led to reflections on how different demographics choose to engage with digital platforms and spaces, and led me to ponder what digital wills may look like for Gen Z-ers and beyond. Ultimately, my goal for this project was not to provide a definitive solution for an ‘ethical’ digital will start-up. Rather, I hope What Will You Leave demonstrates the stark neutrality of such a service, and produces a fruitful discussion on how the inevitable rise of these companies may disrupt and evolve the way we grieve and engage with the memories of those gone.
What Each QR Code Links To:
Jodie, Levi, and (unnamed Grandparents)
What Will You Leave’s Instagram
Works Cited
Bassett, Debra. “Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society.” Social Sciences, vol. 4, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1127–1139., doi:10.3390/socsci4041127.
Brubaker, Jed R., et al. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society, vol. 29, no. 3, 2013, pp. 152–163., doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry.” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 2, no. 5, 2018, pp. 318–320., doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2.
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry.” Minds and Machines, vol. 27, no. 4, 2017, pp. 639–662., doi:10.1007/s11023-017-9445-2.