Your Informational Corpse, Preserving Humanity, and Redefining Intimacy
Thoughtful Net #64: curated links from the past few weeks
A rare Friday edition, and likely the last edition of the year — but also, I think, one of the strongest. It’s also, perhaps, one of the most poignant — or even melancholy — as it contains articles about intimacy, death, the future, and life after death (not our own life, but that of others). I think it’s slightly sad because I’m slightly sad because winter is here.
If I don’t get another edition out before the end of the year, I wish you all the best in your reckoning of the year gone by and your planning for the year ahead.
The Best
Digital Immortality: How Your Life’s Data Means a Version of You Could Live Forever.
The data we produce about ourselves can be used to build a personality profile and — soon enough — to create a digital simulacrum that’s able to sufficiently mimic our words and behaviour, to the point that it could live on after we die. But should that be possible without our permission? By Courtney Humphries.
Should we treat digital remains by the same code that museums use for human remains? If digital remains are like the informational corpse of the deceased, they may not be used solely as a means to an end, such as profit, but regarded instead as an entity holding an inherent value.
This piece has lodged in my head since I read it. I’ve been thinking more about death in the past few years, provoked by a combination of the death of my sister and my own ageing and increased awareness of mortality. After reading the article I’ve given a lot of thought about what should happen to our ‘informational corpse’ after we die. Will we have to stipulate in our wills that it should die along with our physical ones? Will people carry, along with their ‘do not resuscitate’ card, a ‘do not recreate’ card too?
The Networked Self
The IRL Fetish.
Nathan Jurgenson on ‘digital dualism’, the fallacy that we are either offline or online, when in truth we live in a state that involves both. This is from 2012, and even more relevant now than then.
Disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
Faked Out.
Nathan Jurgenson (again) asks whether we’re really entering ’the last days of reality’, or if perhaps truth was never a concept that we could adequately describe.
The modern rise of science and democracy, the industrial revolutions, globalization, the furthering of transportation, urbanism, and mass media all multiply uncertainty by providing access to other cultures, ideas, and ways of knowing. Technology warps what we think is real faster than we can cope, which continues to bring both possibility and despair.
The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity.
It’s frequently said that the internet has caused a decline in intimacy. The problem, says Stephen Marche, isn’t that: it’s that the internet’s entirely changed what intimacy means.
The basic contradiction is as simple as it is desperate: the sharing of private experience has never been more widespread while empathy, the ability to recognize the meaning of another’s private experience, has never been more rare.
Into the Future
The Time Capsule That’s as Big as Human History.
The story of Martin Kunze, an Austrian ceramicist who is trying to preserve a snapshot of modern life for future historians, by etching user-submitted moments into tiles and storing them in a salt mine. This is quite, quite lovely. By Michael Paterniti.
By leaping your mind to the future, the assumption of new understanding that comes with the sludgy passage of time could actually reveal itself in the present moment.
Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’.
Sweden is moving faster than any other country towards a cashless future — so fast, in fact, that no-one really knows what the impact will be, especially on those who haven’t kept up — or can’t keep up — with the pace of technological change. By Liz Alderman.
We need to pause and think about whether this is good or bad, and not just sit back and let it happen. If cash disappears, that would be a big change, with major implications for society and the economy.
The Thoughtful Net is an occasional (less than weekly, more than monthly) publication collecting great writing about the internet and technology, culture, information, society, science, and philosophy. If you prefer to receive it in your inbox you can follow this publication or subscribe to the email newsletter.
