Real Internet Afterlife

8/15/2019 Real Internet Afterlife

1/27

Internet Afterlife 1

1

My talks over the next two days have death as their subject. The first, “Internet

Afterlife”, concerns the cultural phenomenon of how the afterlife is represented in social

media sites. This talk will concern itself primarily with what has been called the “cultural

imaginary”, that is, with how culture, in this case contemporary American culture,

conceives of the afterlife. Philosophy, and philosophers, will figure in the discussion,

primarily commenting on phenomena that they neither created nor control. One of the

themes of my presentations is that American culture generates most of its own

„metaphysics‟, which American professional philosophy either ignores or discusses, but

which it rarely shapes or even influences.

My second talk will be quite different. The „official‟ title is „Death and

Postmodernism‟. What I will really talk about is the work of one, central philosophical

figure who is typically associated with postmodernism - Jacques Derrida. I chose Derrida

for three reasons. First, although postmodernism has been declared „dead‟, Derrida still

lives - figuratively of course - in intellectual circles, and, to the extent that he too is

culturally „dead‟, his specter still haunts philosophy as Derrida claims that Marx‟s specter

still haunts both philosophy and the larger worlds of politics, economics and social theory

and reality. Second, although more than one postmodern figure - one thinks of Blanchot,

Bataille, Levinas, among others — writes a good deal about death, I think there is no

thinker, postmodern or any other sort, who has written more perceptively and

provocatively about death, and mourning, since Freud and Heidegger produced their best

work on the subject in the teens and twenties of the past century. Third, in writing about

death and mourning and ghosts, Derrida also invites us to engage with many other

thinkers. The works we will touch on involve references to Heidegger, Levinas, Aries,


2/27

Internet Afterlife2

2

Kierkegaard, Fukuyama, Diderot, Shakespeare, Patocka, Freud, Stirner and Marx.

When we discuss Derrida, by the way, we will be discussing a philosopher who is

writing „into‟, for and with other philosophers and theorists. In his cultural environment,

philosophers help produce culture alongside other agents, and this marks a serious and

interesting difference between the two cultural settings.

AMERICAN DEATH

I have been studying death for more than twenty years. Unlike most professional

philosophers in the United States I have next to no interest in discussing the definitive

marks of moral and legal death. Nor am I the least bit interested in whether death is or is

not a good thing; nor do I care whether near-death experiences offer any evidence for the

reality of an afterlife. I have nothing against discussions of assisted suicide but find

myself almost entirely on the side of the pro-suicide group, and find little reason to think

much about the issue.

What, then, about death could I find interesting? My first introduction to the subject

was a chance discovery. Everyone here has found, I assume, that even in this digital age

nothing can match the serendipitous delight of wandering along library shelves and

finding what one has really been looking for ten or fifty books away from the one you

thought you were seeking.

In my case the book was not anywhere near where I was looking. It was on one of

those carts librarians use to trundle books back to their proper places. Glancing casually

at such a cart I spied a strange thin book that was larger than the ordinary format. Its

name was “Sleeping Beauty”.


3/27


3

I opened it and was shocked. It was a beautifully and carefully made book of

photographic reproductions. Each page held a single image with a brief title underneath.

The images were clearly, at the beginning of the book, from the earliest days of

photography. They were daguerreotypes. And every one of them was of a dead person,

carefully clothed and arranged, sometimes in a narrow coffin, sometimes sitting propped

in a chair, in once case standing erect, with eyes opened.

I spent the next few hours devouring the images. I looked closely at every page, then

reexamined at many of them. I was repelled and fascinated by turns. A set of questions

arose: what would lead otherwise sane people to think that producing such images was a

good way to remember and honor the dead? Daguerreotypes, I soon learned, could only

be produced using expensive, heavy equipment that required training to handle. These

images were not snapshots or, God forbid, images snapped by a cellphone. They had to

be made by professionals who were called to a home on purpose. And the images

themselves were not casual takes. They were carefully arranged scenes that involved

dressing the corpse in his or her finest clothing and arranging him or her just so.

Exposure times were long - minutes at a time - and the images were incised on a

specially prepared metal plate. There were no negatives, so each shot had to count. And

once the images were produced they were extraordinarily fragile. Only a small fraction of

daguerreotypes has survived because the images are so easily scratched. Those that are

preserved had to be encased, immediately, in frames with glass covers.

So, why would people do this? This was my first question. But others quickly

followed. What else did people in the 1840s do with their dead? Why? How did this

differ from what we do today? What motivated the changes? Finally, what else was going


4/27

Internet Afterlife4

4

on, in both the 1840s and the 2010s, to account for how the dead were treated?

These questions might not seem philosophical at first blush. But they are questions

about what people think is real, about what they know, or think they know, and clearly

they are questions that involve values. So what we do with the dead has metaphysical,

epistemological and ethical dimensions.

I cannot possibly tell you everything I learned about what was going on with post-

mortem photography in the 1840s - for that you would have to invite me back - but

suffice to say that I derived two important lessons from my studies. First, Americans

typically adopt a very d.i.y. attitude to even the most serious matters, such as death and,

second, that Americans are also very willing to use the latest technologies in dealing with

such matters. One might say, crudely, that American intellectuals did not develop

pragmatism in a cultural vacuum.

What do I mean? With reference, briefly, to the first generations of post-mortem

photographs, the very idea of making portraits of the dead had roots in spiritual, one can

say metaphysical, shifts in American attitudes toward the dead. Two features matter.

First, one does not feel comforted by seeing representations of family members, after

their deaths, if one has a fair presumption that said family member is suffering in Hell. In

those areas of the American colonies settled by the various brands of Calvinists who

sought more religious freedom in a new land, such a presumption would make sense in

up to 90% of cases. In the strict Calvinist metaphysics the economy of salvation required

that a just God condemn most people to eternal damnation. In a somewhat perverse

variant on the Leibnizian idea of a best possible world, Calvinists used exactly the same

idea to argue that the best possible world was the one in which the great majority of


5/27


5

people ended up in Hell.

If Americans adopted the custom of commissioning portraits of the dead, or often of

the dying - because such portraits had to be done quickly using the corpse as a model —

then they must have abandoned this severe vision of the world and replaced it for one in

which few people, at least few respectable people, would end up in Hell.

This modified metaphysics, expressed to some extent in American

Transcendentalism, but more vigorously and popularly, the waves of religious

revivalism that swept both the colonies and new republic, expressed this new optimism,

as did the Enlightenment deism of many of the intelligentsia and the politically active

and/or moneyed classes. This was not a systematically developed vision - as anyone who

reads Emerson knows — but a complex of sensibilities, apercus, feels. But it was

powerful and pervasive and made post mortem portraits culturally possible.

But, turning now to the pragmatic side of the issue, portraits, or good ones, at least,

were expensive, then and now. There was no shortage of well-trained artists but there was

a shortage of capital, so that post mortem portraiture remained a popular practice limited

by the costs associated with it.

Even if daguerreotypes were expensive, they were not nearly as expensive as portraits

if for no other reason than that (i) they took minutes rather than days to produce and (ii)

they did not require a fraction of the training to make. So, when such portraits became

possible, they immediately became available. Photography arrived in the United States at

the very end of the 1830s; by the earliest 1840s post-mortem portraiture was widely

advertised.

But there was a deeper philosophical issue than cost. Portraits were seen as second-


6/27

Internet Afterlife6

6

order copies, as interpretations of the real. Inevitably, the artist‟s „take‟ on his subject, as

well as his technical limitations, entered the equation. But photography was „light

writing‟, a felicitous marriage of empirical accuracy and Platonic idealization. When

sunlight „wrote‟ its images on metal plates, focused by human hands but never either

manufactured or guided by those hands, what resulted was an image that combined

empirical precision with an almost mysterious revelatory power. Light and lens not only

captured exactly what was there without filtering it. They also revealed details, and a

holistic truth about the person or thing, that the vagaries of a flitting, inattentive or biased

human gaze could not. Photographs revealed what was always already there, but that

went largely unnoticed: the deeper, but surface moral and metaphysical truth about a

person.

Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to this in his House of the Seven Gables, when x, the

daguerreotype protagonist, makes an image of Judge Y that reveals the latter‟s otherwise

hidden malevolence.

So Americans were drawn to the new technology of representation for economic but

also for epistemological, moral and metaphysical reasons. In this case the new technology

saved money and told the truth, a deeper truth than unaided human sight could tell.

Adapting the new light writing technology to the representation of death meant that

Americans did not fear seeing the deeper truth about the dead. Only if one believed that

the dead were morally pure, blameless, could they be safely exposed to the truth-telling

power of photography. This might explain why, among other reasons, most post-mortem

photographs are of young people, and often of very young children or infants, and why

images of older dead people are always taken when the person is lying in a coffin, as if


7/27


7

any moral impurity in the elderly might be mitigated by locating them in their „proper‟

setting as corpses.

This overlap of the dead and new technology would continue into the twentieth

century and as we shall see, beyond that into the twenty-first. But rather than detailing

this, let‟s turn to a second thematic, that of the American relation to the afterlife.

This consideration begins a long time before the American colonies were ever

thought of, with Plato and early Christianity. There is a finite pool of options available

for any afterlife and Americans had some range of these options available.

But what distinguishes American relations to any afterlife was the persistent and still

powerful American confidence in the ability of the average person to reach Heaven and,

more important, to return to tell about it. This cultural tendency, which is characterized in

Death in America as the tendency to make the boundary between this world and the next

a „permeable membrane‟, expressed and expresses itself in many forms, many connected

to technology.

Early, for our purposes, evidence of this „permeable membrane‟ idea surface in the

1840s — the same decade as the telegraph, the photograph, the railroad and life insurance

— with the activities of the Fox sisters in the so-called „Burnt-over District‟ of upstate

New York, a region that had been crossed and re-crossed by revival movements. The

Hays sisters and their parents began to experience noises and movement in their rural

farmhouse, and soon the sisters were claiming that they had been contacted by the dead.

They went on to become famous mediums and proponents of the widespread

Spiritualist movement which, despite the recantations of two of the sisters, and other

exposures of mediums as frauds, is still a force in American life.


8/27

Internet Afterlife8

8

Although Spiritualism does not offer a well developed theory about the afterlife, it is

premissed on the notions that there is one, and that the dead can contact the living via the

work of mediums. James van Praagh and John Edward are current iterations of successful

mediums.

This interest in spiritualism was culturally strong through the nineteenth century, and

supplemented a general American religious belief in Heaven. The important difference

between spiritualism and traditional beliefs in Heaven was and is that spiritualism gives

the living, and the dead, far more control over their fates, and by extension over death

and its meanings, than traditional religion affords. The premise is that the dead are not

under the control of the traditional post-mortem binaries of Heaven and Hell, nor do they

act at the behest of any god. They seem to be wandering free in some ill-determined

border region that has little to do with traditional versions of the afterlife.

And living people seem to be able to contact the dead, almost at will. John Edward

famously hosted a cable television show for some years in which he claimed to contact

the dead in real time as audience members offered information and made requests.

This tendency is well represented in that genre that Anne Douglas named „consolation

literature‟ in her essay “Heaven Our Home.” This was a form that included both fiction

and nonfiction that arose in the United States in the decades before the Civil War.

Consolation literature had one subject: death, both the process of dying and the business

of mourning, with greater emphasis on the latter.

It represented the merging of several strains in the culture. First, urbanization and the

development of commerce and industry radically altered the status of women in society.

Many women were now compelled by circumstance to enter the urban work force under


9/27


9

less than ideal conditions, at the same time as large numbers of more economically

advantaged women were leaving lives devoted to agricultural labor and entering the

world in which women were primarily stay-at-home mothers and protectors of the home

and its morality.

Second, the new urban environment was crowded and dangerous. Epidemic disease

carried in impure water supplies and poorly prepared food made urban death rates high.

Middle and upper middle class people had scarcely more protection than did the poor.

Consequently, large numbers of young privileged people — people with every advantage

but antibiotics and strong immune systems — were dying before their times. And such

people, well taken care of by doting parents, but now suddenly dead, were being written

about with enormous affection and hope.

Again, Americans, this time progressive mainstream Protestants, were writing about

their experiences and feelings surrounding their dead children, and in so doing were

pushing forward the idea that death, though tragic, was also sweet because parents could

provide every comfort to the dying and could also hope, happily, that their separation

from their children was temporary. This is a literature of reassurance that, in texts such as

Stepping Heavenward , verge on early self-help books about proper grieving. The point is

that once again Americans felt confident that the way to Heaven, to the afterlife, was

open and non-mysterious, and that the dead hovered close by.

This same confidence, and the belief that Heaven and earth, life and death, were

closely allied, was also expressed in the American cemetery movement. Cemeteries in the

21st century are almost necessarily viewed through the skeptical lenses provided by

Jessica Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, tempered by the humanizing influence of Six Feet


10/27

Internet Afterlife10

10

Under . But when cemeteries first emerged as a new cultural form, replacing the crowded,

noisome village or city churchyard, they too represented an American attempt to bring a

form of the afterlife to this world.

American rural cemeteries, as they were called, enlisted the design efforts of leading

civic figures and horticulturists. These cemeteries combined the traditions of the English

garden with Romantic aesthetic theories about the boundary between nature and culture,

and the Christian idea of establishing a heavenly city on earth. Interlarded with these

ideas were the very American notions of private property, the central moral importance of

the nuclear family, and individualism.

Rural cemeteries were caref ully landscaped to look both „natural‟ (a little wild) and

„civilized‟ (with careful plantings, landscape features, and prettily named „streets‟). But

they were also family-centered, individualistic and private: each family bought its own

small lot, which was generally enclosed with an iron grating fence, and the cemetery

imposed few or no restrictions on what families could erect or plant on their plot.

The result were cemeteries - they dotted the East and Midwest, beginning with Mount

Auburn in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1831 — that represented little outposts of Heaven

on earth, enclosed sites in which families spent hours with their dead, picnicking,

socializing, and praying to those they would soon see in another, but not dissimilar

Heaven.

The seamless continuity between this world and the afterlife was reinforced by the

work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose 1866 Gates Ajar , written to commemorate her

brother who had died in the Civil War, was the best selling novel of the American 19th

century after U ncle Tom’s Cabin. Phelps, in this and other books (The Gates Between,


11/27


11

Beyond the Gates, inter alia), created fictions in which deserving but under-appreciated

women would die, or appear to die, and would then visit elaborately described Heavens.

Gates Ajar , supposedly about the protagonist‟s dead brother, is really a closely argued

case for a radical revision of mainstream Protestant conceptions of the afterlife. This

opened the „gates‟ for her later works in which her heroines learn languages, travel on

diplomatic missions, listen to new music by Beethoven (offered in concerts in which the

audience enjoys eight or nine senses!), and have religious-erotic meetings with Jesus.

Far from being mere consolation, this literature forwarded the emerging feminist

agenda but also did something radical that was noted in Harper’s in 1881, in a piece

provocatively titled “The Annexation of Heaven”. Phelps not only connected this life and

the afterlife. She remade Heaven to fit her feminist and more conventional ideals. Her

Heaven is egalitarian, filled with career and educational opportunities for women, and

also provided with lovely upper middle class homes in which women find perfect male

life partners and raise perfect children. For Phelps Heaven has become a simulacrum of

upper middle American life.

This recitation could go on for much longer, but I will telescope my remarks at this

point by claiming - and here you have to give me the benefit of the doubt — that the

American confidence in reaching the afterlife, their equal confidence in being in touch

with that realm, and their boldness in reshaping it in their own image, all continue, as

strong as ever, all through the 20th

and into the 21st century.

I need only mention : Forest Lawn Cemetery and its many imitators, a place that

overtly remakes this earth as an art-filled garden filled with joy, transforming the

cemetery into what amounts to an anteroom to the afterlife; the enormous popularity of


12/27


12

such book as Mitch Albom‟s Tuesdays With Morrie, Five People You Meet in Heaven

and For One More Day; the equally enormous success of the spate of NDE — near-

death experience — books ( Ninety Minutes in Heaven, Heaven Is for Real , Proof of

Heaven, Embraced By the Light); and the almost equal selling power of spiritualist work

(Talking to Heaven, Ghosts Among Us, Unfinished Business, all by James van Praagh;

John Edward‟s After Life and Understanding Your Angels, inter alia).

I need only add the long-running network shows Medium (2005-2011) and Ghost

Whisperer ( 2005 − 2010), the latter of which used van Praagh as an executive producer,

and the American fascination with the undead and revenants(zombies and vampires), to

reinforce my assertions that (1) we live in a culture obsessed with the afterlife and the

dead and (2) that we posit a radical continuity between this world the next.

My final entry to this argument is a reference to a more traditional, conservative but

also somewhat deviant tradition that also talks a great deal about the afterlife and about

the intersection of the worlds of the living and the dead. I mean the Rapture culture, to

which anywhere from 30 to 60 million Americans belong, and which produced the

blockbuster franchise of the twelve book Left Behind series, with its many ancillary

books and its range of products from keychains to films to lunch boxes and young adult

books.

In all these wildly varying forms Americans from every part of the religious and

political spectrum assert their belief in and proximity to the afterlife. This long history,

coupled with the early and persistent connection between death and new technology,

prepares us, finally, to launch an analysis of what I have called Internet Afterlife.


13/27


13

INTERNET AFTERLIFE

Early Days

A. Hollywood Forever

Memorial sites began to appear online as early as the late 1990s, and became more

numerous and popular, and better developed, 9/11, when an official memorial site, which

still exists, was set up. These early sites were not usually highly interactive. It took

specialized knowledge to set up such websites at the end of the 20th

century. There were

individual memorial sites developed by people with such knowledge, but these were not

public. There were a few professionally mounted memorial sites, which were more

public, but they were not numerous and they were strictly memorial. I mean that they

were devoted entirely to images, music and film clips concerning the deceased person.

But that person had no first-order presence on the site. Subjective focus, in the Lockean

and neo-Lockean sense, was entirely absent, and there never had been such a subjective

presence. Thus the sites were entirely one-directional and did not represent much of an

internet afterlife.

This level of memorialization was further developed by the innovative Hollywood

Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Beginning around the turn of the new millennium,

prior to 9/11, this revived cemetery began using film students from USC and UCLA to

produce what amounted to biopics of the dead. The bereaved family and friends could

provide the Hollywood staff with photographs, audio clips and film which they would


14/27


14

edit into a professional-looking product. This film would be put online at the Hollywood

Forever website, and would be available, using a password, at terminals located at

strategic points in the grounds. The same film would be available online from any

computer.

An interesting variant on this idea occurred when, on occasion, people who knew

they were soon to die would provide special film clips, interviews, commentary,

reflections, so that they would introduce a first-person agency into the otherwise closed-

off site, adding a new dimension to the afterlife that the Cemetery could offer.

But we have to admit that this first generation of online versions of an afterlife were

not deeply satisfying, even though such sites persist to this day and are very popular.

However, their continued popularity, which has not been embraced, as far as I know, by

Hollywood Forever, depends in large measure on the fact that they have remade

themselves to resemble social media sites, to which we now turn.

Just as the computing experience was changed forever, for the average user, in the

early 1990s when computers went online — does anyone remember chatrooms and the

hegemony of AOL? — The online experience was changed forever when Friendster, the

first popular social media site, went public in 2002. We will not dwell unnecessarily on

the history of such sites. What interests me, with reference to internet afterlife, is the

later, better know sites, Myspace and Facebook and Twitter, with special focus on the

latter two.

Social media sites differ essentially from older memorial sites in the fact that these

sites were set up by the person when he or she was alive. She set up a profile, listed

interests and musical preferences and favorite books and films, set up a photo album, and


15/27


15

accumulated friends, setting up security barriers and deciding how much of the site to

share with whom. She also might or might not visit the site every day, or every four

hours, or once a month. In all these circumstances the site creator is present as an agent,

and the changes made are all the results of her first-person decisions. And as the site of a

first person agent, the site is also a place where other living people come to visit, to send

messages, post observations, and make announcements. The site is both inherently that of

an individual agent, and inherently public and social.

Thus there are in a sense two people on every Facebook site. First there is the

Lockean consciousness, the „I‟ who makes itself known there. Then there is what I will

call the performative person, or persona, the one enacted as a set of public performances,

and the one defined by its place in a social network, by professional accomplishments, by

public connections such as marriage and parenthood. We can see the person/persona as a

cultural construct, as a public event, the social face of the individual. At the same time we

know, or assume, that there is a unique, essentially private, „other‟ involved in every

Facebook site, an „I‟ whose public persona occupies the site, an „I‟ that more or less fully

expresses and (partially) reveals itself in and through this persona.

Every year, by one approximation, 800,000 members of Facebook die. A similar,

proportional number of Myspace, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest members die. But in

all these services, the sites, with their implicit promise of agency, do not die. They are

for practical purposes eternal. In that unprocessed sense every person with a social media

account has an automatic afterlife, in the sense that everyone who uses these services

„lives‟ on online, without the dying person having anything to do to insure it, and without

that person having much control over whether they have this afterlife or not. Clearly, as


16/27


16

in the case of the aforementioned memorial sites, this is not a very interesting or

philosophically provocative afterlife.

But it has potential, because unlike the memorial sites, Facebook pages as we said

above presuppose individual agency, therefore the intermittent presence of someone who

acts like a living human being, posting comments, adding photos, answering friends

messages and so forth. The Facebook pages of the dead do none of these things, unless,

as often and eerily happens, the deceased page owner has set up messages to be delivered

on certain predetermined dates and occasions. I know people who have visited the page

of a friend who committed suicide (and whose body was not recovered for several

months) and were unnerved to find new messages, as if from beyond the grave.

But most Facebook pages of the deceased, like the deceased, do not move. But unlike

the deceased they also do not decompose. On a very crude level, human corpses present a

serious disposal problem. Corpses do not usually have much of a career above ground or

outside the crematorium. With a very few exceptions the dead disappear within a few

days. And they leave their agency-driven Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and

Instagram photos, as well as domain names, blogs and online bank and stock portfolio

accounts behind. All of these are password-protected, of course, and yes, many people

leave behind their password protection services as well.

But Facebook and other SNS sites are essentially interactive, and become anomalous

when their potential for inactivity stops. The agent guiding the site has become, to borrow

Heidegger‟s term in referring to death, „impossible‟ as an agent. This does not mean that

the Facebook page has to disappear, just because its agent had ceased being an agent. In a

sense the absent agent is still present, albeit in an altered form. Images remain, as does


17/27


17

biographical information, friend lists, the „wall‟ on which friends can post news and, if

permissions are set up a certain way, the home page on which the absent agent once

posted comments and on which friends can still post comments.

Philosophers like Patrick Stokes, using the neoLockean distinction, a distinction

replicated in William James‟s Psychology, between the subjective “I” and the public,

objective “person” or “me”, argue that the person or „me‟ does survive on Facebook,

especially when the page has been transformed into a memorial site. This survival is

enhanced when family members or friends are authorized to run the memorial page.

Under these circumstances the deceased person‟s „persona‟ can actually be enriched and

developed by people adding information that the departed agent might never have

included. The objective persona then develops a renewed „life‟ after death, becoming

more developed post-mortem.

And a community often grows up around this renewed persona, whom Stokes calls a

„patient‟ in the sense that this objective, public persona can receive attentions, gifts, good

wishes and the like from his or her friends. And since the per sona or „me‟ is already

something of a social construct, the ongoing activities of the mourning community

progressively add content to the persona, so that, as we often see in the case of deceased

celebrities, and saw before the world went online, the dead can have a complex,

interesting and extended afterlife as objects of memorial reinventions.

But you and I already know that this sort of afterlife is not what we value. Being

remembered is a wonderful thing, in an etiolated, abstract way. It might even bring some

people some level of consolation when they contemplate it before they die. Many people

claim that leaving a legacy is what really matters to them. But when we analyze such


18/27


18

statements they ring somewhat hollow because they seem, really, to be about how one

feels, while alive, about being remembered after one is dead. If one can never experience

being remembered, after one has died , then the consolation derived from this thought

seems less appealing. It has the desperate quality one sometimes suspects when one

studies suicides: the thought that one will only be truly appreciated after one is dead

might offer some sad satisfaction to the suicide, but if one is not there after the fact to

witness the sharp regret felt among those left behind, the suicide seems an empty,

tragically mistaken gesture.

But Facebook pages offer something more than the survival of a remembered and

augmented public persona. Here is where internet afterlife becomes interesting. From

several studies that people have made of how the bereaved actually use the Facebook and

Myspace pages of the dead, a more ambiguous picture begins to emerge.

First, without the benefit of any well-formed theory about the afterlife, or even any

belief in it, many people return to memorial SNS months and years after the agent‟s death

and disappearance, not to leave further memorial messages, or to share condolences with

other mourners, but to leave „real time‟ messages for the dead, detailing events in the

survivor‟s life as if the deceased Facebook agent were listening/reading posts. The page

itself sometimes becomes an ontologically and epistemologically „fuzzy‟ location, a

space between this world and some other one, or, more provocatively, a destination

‘space’ , as if the page were either a conduit to another world, or itself another world.

Let me be clear. At this point I am not talking about people who already believe in

Heaven or something like it. We will get to those people in a minute. No; here, I am

talking about people who have not thought much about such issues, or who do not


19/27


19

believe. And yet they visit SNS pages and talk in real time to the dead. We can say, to

reassure ourselves, that this easily explained. Facebook pages have been sites where

agents appear and represent themselves and in returning to such sites and acting as if an

agent still „lived‟ there we are simply reverting to old habits. We „know‟ that Amanda is

not really listening but we want her to be so we act as if she were - Kant was perceptive

when he talked about the „als ob’ and, in this age when we still entertain some level of

postmodern self-awareness and irony, we can tolerate such indulgence with a wry shrug

and smile.

But what if the experience, phenomenologically, is not just an „as if‟ moment of

harmless self-deception? What if the existence of some sort of visible/invisible,

real/virtual universe „out there‟, which we describe now, not as „cyberspace‟ but

increasingly as „the cloud‟(a much more Heavenly reference), suggests that people who

do not believe in Heaven are beginning, in a thoroughly non-ironic way (an instance of

the New Sincerity?) to inhabit a new logical and perhaps ontological space, in which they

spend more and more of their lives? What we we have created, not simply a convenient

way to keep in touch, but a literal new form of being?

I emphasize, and this is centrally important, that this new form of being I am

speculating about is, unnervingly, not one I have to argue for or present evidence in favor

of. As philosophers we have all wasted at least some of our time reading tedious,

unconvincing arguments about the reality of the afterlife and the immortality of the soul.

Ever since Plato trotted out his multiple bad proofs for the immortality of the soul in

Phaedo, 2,300 years ago, philosophers have been subjected to these failed attempts to

offer conclusive arguments and evidence for the reality of another world. Now we seem


20/27


20

to have created just such a world online, in which immortality, in some form, really does

seem possible. And we do not need to argue for that world because we can go there by

pushing a „Return‟ key or an „On‟ button. It is always already there; things that have to

do with us have been going on when we were not there, and we can enter the world and

change it with almost no effort.

Anyone who has taught in a college classroom knows that today students do not need

imaginations to escape the tedium of a discussion of the problem of induction. They can

open up their laptops, appear to be taking fervent notes on this topic, and be playing

poker or downloading the last Kanye West tracks. Everyone, with the important

exceptions of the economically disadvantaged and the elderly, has easy acces to this other

world, and to deny it a special ontological status seems backward.

But even if we are willing to entertain the idea that the internet has created a new

form of being we still fall short of making internet afterlife a plausible subjective option.

Sure, the world wide web on the internet is always „on‟, and we as objective personae

will live forever, everywhere and everywhen, on those web pages — as long as there is

current, and radio and micro waves. And those who live beyond us might leave us

messages as if we were alive, and we might even in some sense be alive as patients, as

receivers of messages. But we still are not surviving as subjects, as agents. There are no

credible reports of ghosts on SNS pages. Dead people do not post on their, or anyone

else‟s, Facebook pages. The dead do not tweet. And if they do not, being dead seems to

revert to its old status; the new reality represented by the internet has done nothing to

change that.

But now we come to another layer of this reflection. There are many millions of


21/27


21

people who believe, in a much more literal way, that they can leave real time messages

on memorial Facebook pages and that these messages will get through to „living‟ people,

to subjects who could respond if they wanted to. These are the people who already

believed in Heaven or some form of afterlife before they ever went online, and who

believe that SNS pages are a privileged conduit for messages to the other world.

Even though the belief in the afterlife antedated their participation in the new level of

being, these people use the internet, which I now postulate as an intermediate kind of

being, perhaps and perhaps not between this world and another one, as a kind of

dependable portal for communicating with the dead in whatever Heaven they might now

occupy. Many of the comments people use on SNS pages make this belief clear: they

send messages to their friends in Heaven, and, sometimes, write that they feel the

presence of the dead in or on the page. The dead need not, and are not expected to, leave

literal messages, but there is no diffidence about their reality either „beyond‟ the page or

on the page. In both cases the people leaving posts clearly believe that the dead have full

access to the internet.

But in this cases, or these cases, we run, frustratingly, into the same logical space in

which the bad arguments for the reality of Heaven and/or the immortality of the soul

reside. We begin the pointless accumulation of putative „evidence‟ for the reality of the

presences, either in Heaven or on the site. I confess to having no interest in such

discussions and also confess that I feel more comfortable among the people who go to the

pages and leave real time messages and cannot fully explain why they are acting as if the

dead somehow still monitored their social media pages - but continue to act that way,

anyway.


22/27


22

What I hope I have established here is that [I] there is an objective, public form of

internet afterlife that lives on in SNS pages; (ii) that the internet itself has become a semi-

autonomous „other world‟ that might represent a new form of being with its own rules

about what it real and can be known; (iii)that in this world people without developed

beliefs in souls or the afterlife go online to memorial social media pages and leave real

time messages as if the dead can somehow live on, online; (iv) that people who already

believe in Heaven definitely believe that they contact the dead online and that the web,

and especially SNS, are privileged portals for contacting the dead, so that reality now has

three levels: this world, the Cloud and Heaven.

Avatars and Tweeters

So far I have covered what I call the „spiritual‟ dimension of internet afterlife, that is,

ideas about how the subjective „I‟, the invisible component of my identity, might survive

online. We have argued that the objective „me‟ has no problem both persisting and

flourishing online and that survival of the subjective „I‟ is reported , but of course cannot

be experienced , by the living me. Now we enter a much more materialistic arena of

internet afterlife — who ever thought there would be so much to consider about this

question? — In which well-rehearsed discussions about robots, Turing machines and

Chinese Rooms begin to figure. The arena we are entering is that of the post-mortem

tweeter and the online avatar.

We can dispense with the post-mortem Tweeter rather quickly, but need to note her

existence if only in passing. A service is now offered on the Internet that, for a price, will


23/27


23

do an analytic study of your past tweets, learning both the style and the content of those

postings. The study will tell how you tweet, and about what issues and to what other sites

you might send messages. Having done the analysis the service will continue to post

tweets in your name - or, as your username - with no reference to that fact that you are

dead. You will then keep commenting on events, engage in exchanges, and post your

own tweets indefinitely. And if the service is really good at finding your style and

frequency, etc., you might live on online for years and years without anyone knowing

that you are actually dead.

Of course, again, the „being‟ who tweets is your username, which continues either to

have agency or to appear to have agency, but it is unhappily not you as a real time

subject. There might be a real time subject composing and posting the tweets, (or it might

be a robot, or a program designed to manufacture tweets), but even though the tweets

appear in your (user)name they will not be your tweets if we think of you as a persisting

experienced identity that is self-consciously aware that it is you. But this raises the

question of whether your username, acting as you and acting like you, is you in the sense

of being an accurate representation of you that counts, in practical terms, as you in the

Twitter world.

The question is, if you set up such an account, would you be guilty of some level of

dishonesty or inauthenticity? Remember, the tweets emanate from your username, are

consistent with that username, and make no claim to be anything but the posts emanating

from that name. Do the tweets properly belong to you as you or to that username? And,

say, someone on Twitter knows that your username is you, and does not know that you

are dead, would they feel somehow misused or cheated were they to discover that they


24/27


24

were interacting with a dead person? Or say they knew full well that you were dead but

found your tweets interesting and worth a response. And say they responded. To whom

would they be responding?

We might set up an interesting scenario on either Twitter or Facebook in which the

visitor knows that someone other than the putative agent is issuing posts and keeps

responding anyway, perhaps even finding the post-mortem version of the individual more

appealing than the live version. And yet they are responding to a username that has

moved from one subjective „I‟ to another, but without the username changing. Locke

might have some interesting things to say about such a case.

AVATARS

I leave the Twitter case unresolved and move to what is still a very peripheral but also

a very intriguing iteration of online afterlife. Although this version uses software entities

that have existed since the public birth of the internet, and even before, it is a version of

internet afterlife that has not yet gained much traction, and might or might not do so in

the future. But on the chance that it does take off, the following considerations might

interest you.

There is a company called Intellitar that has been offering post-mortem avatars for

sale for a few years. But as I said above this idea has gained very little traction and the

Intellitar site is now down for alleged repairs and redesign. Whether it ever opens again,

or is replaced by something else, the idea deserves some attention. Intellitar offers

virtually(!) the same services as the Twitter service discussed above. But instead of

replicating 140 character tweets, Intellitar promises to use photographs, video, audio


25/27


25

files and extensive personal information you provide — a combination of memorial site

information and Match.com — to craft an online avatar using the latest CGI technology.

I am not clear whether this avatar would be the sort of thing that could learn and

develop from interacting with live people, either using written posts of live image

services such as Facetime. But it would move and talk and would look very much like

you, resembling the so-called „chatbots‟ that appear, annoyingly, at various places on

your screen to sell products. These avatars would also resemble those that people develop

in computer games, or when they engage in such simulation „games‟ as Second Life. The

difference is that these avatars, the product of a technology called IAP, Intelligent Avatar

Program, would be programmed to develop in such a way that, according to the CEO of

the company that created them, they could pass the philosophically famous Turing test.

When I went online searching for more information on these avatars I found the site

„closed for repairs‟. Although there were Home, Login, Support and other buttons one

might expect to find at such a site, none of these worked. I then visited a second site,

virtualeternity.com, where the avatars would, supposedly, appear, but that site was also

dormant. Further searching did find a „live‟ site in which the avatars were described in

some detail. But this was a site for a Somerset Museum, in the state of Georgia, and these

avatars, rather than representing people who had died, were appearing as docents for the

museum and were modeled after fampus historical figures. Apparently these avatars

would act as virtual guides, but it was not clear exactly how they would appear and speak

to museum visitors.

It is clearly a bit early for such post-mortem avatars. Even the CEO of Intellitar, Don

Davidson, admitted that such virtual revenants lived, metaphorically, in what he called

http://match.com/http://virtualeternity.com/http://virtualeternity.com/http://match.com/


26/27


26

„uncanny valley‟, and were likely to appear “creepy” to most people, as they did to the

CNET reporter, Rafe Needleham, who spoke with Davidson and wrote a piece about

them in 2010.

Needleham makes an interesting criticism of the psot-mortem avatars. Beyond being

creepy, they are not designed to link up with the post-mortem identities „ what

Needleham calls the „virtual personalities” people have already created on social media

sites. Needleham accepts this form of internet afterlife and sees the lack of linkage as a

defect — as if a proper post-mortem virtual identity, what Choudduroy calls one‟s

„virtual soul‟ were already a given, such that any avatar pretending to be you should at

least incorporate the information about you that already exists online.

The post-mortem avatar, of course, raises all kinds of issues, and reminds one not

only of the Turing test but of Parfit‟s famous thought experiment about an individual

being teleported, as a mind, to another planet to be reincorporated in a new body, but

with exactly the same consciousness. Obviously the avatar‟s „consciousness‟ as currently

constituted would be a thin copy of one‟s actual subjectivity and would actually, like

Dennett‟s robots, utterly lack anything it was like to be that avatar, and completely lack

one‟s first order “I” awareness.

But we can run our own thought experiment. What if, in the not terribly distant future, it

was possible to capture the entire electrochemical „map‟ of one‟s brain, turn it into a

digital program, then upload that onto a hard drive and thence into the avatar. Would

one‟s first order awareness then literally live on in a different sort of world on-screen?

Let‟s speculate further that in the future environmental considerations dictate that people

who die cannot be cloned because the earth is too crowded and this would preclude new

people from being born. So, life as an avatar is all this is available. Is it even thinkable

that a subject, an „I‟, could inhabit such an avatar? If so, in what would such an existence


27/27


consist? I leave you to contemplate that thought, and leave you to contemplate all that I

have said about internet afterlife.

Documents

Real Internet Afterlife