In her article “Airbnb has a dead people problem: The morbid side of the sharing economy,” Kashmir Hill introduces yet another tension between death and technology: sharing economy start-ups such as Airbnb and Getaround (the Airbnb equivalent for vehicles). Renting a stranger’s car or home gets a lot more bizarre when that person accidentally happens to be dead. This phenomenon is not entirely uncommon; for example, “ghost cars in the system” from dead owners are often realized months late and “…it’s possible they’d continue to be rented post-owner-mortem as those rentals require no action by the car’s owner beyond checking to make sure it’s cleaned out between rentals.” Case in point: during his Airbnb stay, Jordan Ruttenberg discovered that the young woman whose home he was renting had died. In need of lodging and having already paid for the rental, Jordan decided to stay the two weeks until the end of his rental, describing the experience as creepy but necessary. His traveling companion, however, chose to leave immediately. The worst part? It took 4 months for Airbnb to even notice the woman had died—and only after Newsweek published an article describing Jordan’s experience.
So why was it so creepy for Jordan to stay in the woman’s apartment after her death? Nothing had physically changed in the apartment by her death (after all, she had died in an entirely different state) and besides, Jordan never knew or met the woman in person. Why was this space quickly transforming into an uncanny site rather than the vacation spot it was supposed to be? I believe the answer to this question lies in two fundamental problems. First, the concept of invasiveness is at play in Jordan’s unease. Occupying this woman’s space was only okay when she was living and thus able to consent to his presence in her home. But what happens then when she’s dead and he’s living in this intimate, personal, and (semi-) private sphere of her life. Does he no longer have a right to be there? There is a certain level of violation at play in this scenario; Jordan’s physical presence presents a threat to the preservation of this woman’s space.
Secondly, it’s important to note that Jordan continued to stay in the apartment after her death because he had already paid for the rental and he wanted his money’s worth. At its foundation, Airbnb is a transactional service. I myself always find it a little jarring to inhabit someone’s personal, private space often without ever meeting them in person. It’s certainly strange, commercializing the personal. How do we prioritize the dueling realities of a space that is at once a home and a business? The discussions we’ve had in class recently regarding social media and digital inheritance echo this Airbnb dilemma: When someone dies, what do we do with their highly personal artifacts (homes, Instagram, etc.) that also occupy a public domain? And how do we balance what is ethnical with what is fair; it may not be ethically right to stay in the dead woman’s apartment but it’s also not fair if Jordan, broke and without other lodging, loses both money and shelter through no fault of his own.
Inhabiting the space of a dead person is a reminder of our own mortality. We are forced to bear witness to the mundane and banal continuity of an apartment that doesn’t die with the person or somehow disappear. The value and meaning of objects and furniture (and their intentional placement in a living space) are imbued by its owner, and not necessarily inherent to the objects themselves. Thus, when we die, our memories, photos and possessions, once so inherently tied to the space and our identity within it, lose their importance . The apartment, while unchanged physically, lost its human value, no longer a sacred embodiment of its inhabitant’s identity (“it’s a piece of me”), but rather a transactional piece of property.
References: Hill, Kashmir. “Airbnb Has a Dead People Problem: The Morbid Side of the Sharing Economy.” Fusion. N.p., 11 Feb. 2015. Web. 30 Mar. 2017.