Virtual Grave
The ghosts of social media
About a year ago I received a Facebook friend request from a dead man. I’ll call him by a different name, Ivan Mikhailov, to protect his posthumous privacy.
When I got the request, I didn’t know who he was — or that he was dead. His name looked familiar, and I saw that we shared many Facebook friends, including my husband. I pressed the “accept request” button. I did think that his photo was a little peculiar. With his glowing eyes, hollow cheeks, and long gray hair, he reminded me of a Christian martyr. Most of his posts had some sort of a Christian message too, like “Art ploughs, but Gospel sows.”
It was only then that I realized who Ivan was — the ex-husband of my husband’s ex-wife. I remembered my husband mentioning that Ivan had become a devout Christian.
So when my husband came home, I told him that I friended his ex’s ex.
“Which ex?” he asked.
“Ivan Mikhailov,” I said.
“Ivan Mikhailov is dead.”
It turned out that Ivan had died two years before that, which apparently didn’t prevent him from being very active on Facebook. He posted, he liked, and he commented. “That’s pretty creepy,” I said. My husband agreed, admitting that there were times when he felt like yelling: “Shut up, Ivan, you’re dead!”
Obviously, this wasn’t Ivan acting from his grave. It was his widow, who took it upon herself to preserve Ivan’s online presence.
But this knowledge didn’t alleviate the creepiness — it enhanced it.
Most of the posts were just shares of other posts on the Christian topics. There were posts written in the widow’s voice, which included pie recipes and videos of puppies playing with kittens with the caption, “Adorable!” But there were also some posts and comments that had the seemingly genuine perspective of a dead man. In those, Ivan admitted that there was “joy in death,” or that he was “resting peacefully in heaven.” Some even attempted deadpan humor. “Could it be,” he was asking, “that some people are getting brand-new souls, while others secondhand ones?” The question was enhanced by a winking emoticon.
Still, the worst were his “likes.” They always took me unawares, making my heart beat like crazy and goosebumps pop up on my skin.
I did try to unfriend Ivan — but every time I was about to do it, his penetrating stare stopped me.
How do you unfriend a dead man? Wouldn’t it be the ultimate act of paying of last disrespects?
I asked my friends if anybody had a similar problem. A few said that they had a couple of FB ghosts, but none of them were lively enough to truly freak them out. One of my friends said that she was bothered by the activity on the page of a good friend who had recently died of cancer. Apparently, her widowed husband used the page to talk about his grief. His posts were liked and supported by hundreds of people, most of them women, who commented with increasingly romantic undertones. “My heart goes out to you.” “My heart is breaking when I think of you out there all alone.” “I wish I could come over and console you!” My friend said that she would hate the idea of her husband using her memorial page to flirt with other women. We all agreed that this will be repugnant, but couldn’t agree on a solution.
We talk with friends and family members through messages, we document our everyday lives on Twitter, we post our innermost thoughts on Facebook, we Instagram our intimate moments. We have created complete digital personas for ourselves.
Our generation is the first to have two lives: real and virtual. And as the first digital generation ages, we are faced with the question of what to do with our digital legacies.
Most people do nothing. They ignore the question of their virtual mortality in the same manner they ignore the question of their physical mortality. But while physical death will come whether you do something or not, virtual death won’t. By doing nothing, you’re basically leaving your digital legacy to fend for itself.
How to solve this problem?
One solution was offered by a computer programmer friend with a distinctly dark mind. He wanted to have his online presence annihilated the second he himself died. He thought that his social media accounts’ service teams should take care of that. “How will they know if you’re dead or not?” I asked. “There should be an app for that,” he suggested. We discussed an app attached to a heart monitor that would send a signal to your social media accounts as soon as your heart stopped beating. (“This asshole’s dead,” or something along those lines.)
There were other, more creative solutions put forth, as well. You could make out a virtual will with detailed instructions on how you wanted your digital persona to behave after you died. Wouldn’t it be nice if you friends got a “Happy birthday!” message from you every year — or maybe even something like “Come visit me in hell!” if you didn’t like your friends that much.
At one point, I became inspired by the teachings of the nineteenth century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who was very much into resurrection, or restoring human life and making it infinite. He actually went so far as to predict cloning. My thought was that it would be entirely possible to clone online personas if you applied linguistic algorithms to the tons of text people left on their social media, with text being the equivalent of genetic material.
I wish I had enough stamina or insanity to seriously consider these options, but that would require to ponder my mortality, and who ever wanted to do that? Life is too short as it is to waste it planning your death.
My solution was to put all these ideas into my new novel and make my characters explore the darkness, while I stepped aside and pretended that death had nothing to do with me, just like everybody else is doing.
But meanwhile, social media ghosts are out there, posting, sharing, commenting, liking. There will be more and more of them every day.
Lara Vapnyar’s new novel is Still Here, out now from Hogarth.
“Vapnyar writes convincingly about technology’s impact on her characters, offering a brilliant critique of it.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
