Life after death, 2014
Lately, I have been grappling with the future of urban planning — trying to understand what future means — what is changing and how — and what I need to do to be geared for it. I started out by reading blog posts by Superflux, a company that undoubtedly does some of the most interesting design futurescaping work. It was through this blog post written by Anab that I got introduced to Lebbeus Woods. Till date, architecture to me was, well, the act of building a building contextually. But Lebbeus is telling another story. While I have only begun reading about his work, I think that he is essentially talking about societal change and its manifestation that can happen through architecture and architecture thinking. After reading one of his interviews with BLDGBLOG, I was left intrigued and I wanted to know more. I followed with a visit to his blog (which I highly recommend); and the last entry was about him writing a new book and that he won’t be as active as he used to be on his blog.
After reading his interview and the last blog post, I googled him and landed on his Wikipedia page. This is when it struck me that Wikipedia was talking about him in the past tense. Lebbeus Woods (1940–2012).
His website, his blog, his work, his thoughts, his photographs existed, his legacy alive. This reminded me of a friend and ex-colleague who passed away recently. She still lives on her Facebook page that I sometimes revisit to remember her; and I could still contact her, only that I wouldn’t get a response. This again took me to the reoccurring theme in Buddha’s life — his fear of death and how to find a ‘way out’. I guess he just had to be born as a millennial — at least theoretically.
So coming to the title, what happens digitally when someone dies? I found a website–The digital beyond, that provides services for digital death and afterlife. These services include sharing memories of the deceased, an online store saving what was most precious to you and so on. It seems that while we need to legally prepare for death (by making a will) and decide on the funeral, we also have to prepare for a digital death. But now you can make a digital will that will spell out how your online identity must be treated after your death and you could also nominate a next of kin. As McCallig rightly said, ‘currently a lot of today’s information that is relevant for researcher and historians of the future is behind walls and owned by companies’. Needless to say, there are commercial repercussions of physical death. The future performance of companies might be gauged on this. Also, needless to say, digital history leaves the question of privacy. Currently, Facebook has a policy where you can request an account to be memorialised or deleted in the event a person’s death. But how many people give this a serious thought? We have now become virtual hoarders.
This experience leaves me with the thought that our society has changed drastically and so have the social norms. Before the intervention of digital technologies, we relied on memories to remember the departed–the time spent together, the sound of their voice, the touch of their hands, the sparkle in their eyes, the way they conducted business. But now we are increasingly faced with digital memorialised accounts, and it holds commercial potential, both for personal use as well as for businesses. But what if the companies that hold our information perish? Will we go back to where we came from? Bah–we’ll figure out a way to build on top of what we have. We might depart while leaving memories–good or bad, but we will surely depart with digital traces, if not history. It is a very strange feeling–that death is inevitable, but the death of our existence is not.
