Both the Gravesites and Websites and Beyond the Grave pieces make it apparent that online profiles and our digital lives are going to be yet another space that we will need to figure out what to do with after we die. But what happens if technology becomes so advanced that our digital profiles allow us to “live” on beyond our body’s lifetime? It may sound hypothetical, but if you combine the technology from “Be Right Back” with another Black Mirror episode that I analyzed in my Snapchat Horror Story, “The Entire History of You,” it suddenly seems like a question we need to confront now.
In “Be Right Back,” we see Martha struggle with how to deal with Ash’s death, and while she’s able to preserve some of his memory through chat-bots and the grow-in-a-bath-body, the technology falls short when it can’t figure out how Ash would have behaved. In “The Entire History of You,” a device implanted in the brain records every single memory, even from birth if parents decide to give their baby one (which happens). If you combined these two technologies – persona replication based on digital information with an entire digital log of how the individual behaved and what they said and how they said it etc. – then it seems that you could make a perfect replica of a dead person. Pair this with some good AI and off your digital persona goes for eternity.
The ethics of such technology are obviously questionable, and thus the entire series of Black Mirror, but both the series and the pieces we’ve read demand that we start to explore how technology can handle death in more nuanced ways, and these episodes give us one take on how that could look. And while it may seem like a big can of worms, the possibility that the digital place will be just another space to curate through a will and testament makes the problem seem a bit less overwhelming. I at least, would rather decide for myself.