Your Digital Afterlife
There is a photographer’s Instagram page that I often revisit. Let’s call him Jonah. His photos are crisp and have motion embedded in them: people in the throes of laughter, a man climbing out of the ocean and on to a boat, shoes neatly stacked under a coat rack with a coat that looks like it is about to slip off its hook. The photographs are expansive and that is saying something especially when viewing it on my 5 inch phone screen. The startling grey of the sky, lemon yellow clouds, the glint of foliage through wooden floorboards of a balcony — all of it leaves me with a sense of pause. There is so much going on in this world in terms of colour and pattern yet so rarely do I look at anything so closely apart from my phone.
However, our photographer’s main focus was not just the natural world. Many of his photographs feature his wife. Beautifully framed, looking here, looking over there, chin slightly raised, in bold glasses and a red lip, leaning against a car, sometimes just lying in the sun on soft lawn grass. These photos are intimate — so much so that they seem to be taken by another hand. These frames, unlike the rest, are inviting, open, and leave me with a strange sense of longing.
While all of his photos are beautiful in their own right, I return to them more often than not because of a singular fact:Jonah is now dead. Years before I had a chance to ever meet Jonah, his wife or see these photographs, Jonah passed away. In his bio, marked like a tombstone is the parenthesis of his life. Here, ddmmyyyy is point A and here, ddmmyyyy + 30 is point B.
What does death mean for your social media profile? Unlike the sober homogeneity of a cemetery, dormant social media profiles add a narrative to a person. Somewhere in the circuits of tech giant machinery, in precisely gathered 1s and 0s is data that my phone reaches out to, thrumming the optic fibres, returning with boolean choices, lighting up my screen, rearranging the pixels and voila! bringing forth, bringing up, and bringing to life an internet account of someone who used to exist. And in this way, despite wherever their heart and their soul may be, they still occupy space — in microscopic Silicon atoms. They are not names set in stone; more ephemeral and can vanish with a swipe. And yet this little insight into their personalities touches me in a way that graveyards rarely do.
Are these dormant profiles just shells then? Are they like molting feathers and snakeskin? Or are they little traps — pyramids of the Valley. A little piece of yourself forever enshrined, treated, and preserved. A never ending wake?
Our relationship with death, both ours and of others, has always been contentious. An abnormal affinity for it? Harmful. A complete disconnect from the very idea of it? You live your entire life in a glass lie. One that can shatter at any moment and one that you have no shield against. What now when you add social media to the mix? Here, I am getting to know of someone and their life well beyond their passing. But not in a passive documentary or memoir but in a lot more invasive way. I am getting to know what he found worth pausing on, what he found beautiful unfiltered and untampered — through his own eyes. I can sense the love for his wife, the joy of seeing the sun sit on the sea, the split second he had to press the camera button before the joke died, and the devastation his death must have brought. His dated photographs are like the bridge of a song that I know will end in a sweet sadness — all entirely imagined.
You may argue that there is of course always the option of deactivating and deleting someone’s profile. Or set them to private you might say. And yet, on the highways of the internet traffic, this is a little pitstop I occasionally make. What does that say about me?
It is not just the gram + unknowable strangers that offer up this absurd experience. For the longest time, I had my mother’s cellphone number stored under her name — even after my father took it over. Whenever he would call, “Amma” is calling would be the text that my phone read out. Amma had stopped calling long back and yet, I felt guilty to transfer the ownership of her contact details. My father clearly felt worse — giving up her number altogether was not an option. He gave up his instead. He even went so far as to adopt her Facebook account as his own. Her last posted profile picture had been of a white tiger — one that my father left up as is. It’s been over a decade now and the picture remains.
In the Netflix comedy drama, “Never Have I Ever”, we see the show’s titular character, Devi, panic bawling at losing the contents of her phone by dropping it into a hot tub. “The voicemail!” she righteously screams. The last voice note left to her by her late father — sweet, unpractised and completely loving is her anchor point through her tumultuous grief. Without it, what scraps of her father would she have held on to? That is not a rhetorical accusation. I am probing, clueless. I have only ever experienced death in the digital age. The last time I spoke to someone is timestamped for me on all my devices. The last time they logged on to a messaging service is recorded for me painfully, “last seen at …” — a once pulsing, bright green dot now grey, lifeless.
I turn 29 in September and most of my generation have yet to encounter an internet littered with accounts of those who once were. There is of course the logistical problem to all of this — in terms of server space. Maybe not now but a hundred generations hence? And then comes the question of inheritance. The first ever “@ted” on the bird app or the gram is guaranteed to exit his online and offline life at some point. There may be infinite number of username permutations but there is only one “@ted” and one person who holds that account at the given time. What happens then to these handles? Are they passed on like houses? Written into wills? Auctioned at a Sotheby’s IG Live?
If I draw the curtain of the future aside even briefly, I find that technology is dominated by mimicry. Attempts at simulating and recreating the known universe — either on Minecraft or in a mixed reality are no longer water cooler conversations — they’re actual projects with enormous potential. But in all of this diluted reality — digital, analog, mixed — have we taken a moment to consider what will remain when all the people who occupied the first roles and first headsets are gone? How will digital archeology look (for it surely will exist)?
Jonah’s wife is a photographer as well. A portrait photographer to be specific. She takes headshots as well as dramatic poses for all kinds of women. Her profile swerves from professional outtakes to heartbreak without notice. Amid scores of faces is a piece of wood engraved with her and Jonah’s initials. She pours her grief into the caption. Her writing is beautiful. It is still early on in her mourning and the wounds are still fresh. Time will eventually stack many different faces between this post about Jonah and the next. The frequency will dim and at one point, over the years, she will find love again. It will be beautiful, heartfelt and so well-deserved. And then sometime during the pandemic, there will be motherhood. Then, there will be a new career. Life will spill over into colour — the drab, moody photographs will continue to dot her timeline but less so. As with everything in the world, Jonah’s account will remain unchanged but everybody else except perhaps his wife will visit it less and less. And at one point, it will no longer be remembered by his relatives, friends, or strangers like me. Even its memory, for you do not remember what you forgot, vanishes. Whichever way you look at it, Jonah remains resting in peace. It is those alive and restless that continue to grapple with death until death happens to us.
