Memento Mori in the Digital Age
(A brief content warning: this post deals with death and suicide, and depending on your mental state, may not be what you need right now. Proceed at your own discretion.)
By and large, most of our digital systems have not been designed with the inevitability of death in mind. This isn't unique to cyberspace, of course. English poet Michael Rosen, in one of a series of poems talking about the death of his son Eddie, talks about having to inform various businesses and institutions that the person they're sending mail to, about clothes and blood drives, doesn't exist anymore. Consumer capitalism, and digital capitalism as an extension of that system, sees people as perpetually existing rational actors, choosing what to eat, what to wear, what to watch, what to think, for eternity. It tries to look away, for as long as it can, from that one big thing that none of us choose.
Tech startups are generally started up by people who are very young, who don't really have any pressing concerns about the inevitability of death. Most of the great, mythical "founders" -- Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg -- started their companies when they were in their early 20's, when questions about death are at their most hypothetical. Zuckerberg's main concern when making The Facebook wasn't that someday, his website would be filled with the digital headstones of millions of people, young and old, rich and poor, and that there should be some kind of system for handling that; his main concern was getting college kids laid.
This aversion to death occasionally verges into absolutely deranged territory. Peter Thiel talks about his disagreement with "the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual", as if that's something you can just disagree with. Bryan Johnson has spent millions chasing after perpetual youth, to the point of optimizing every single micro-decision in his life around preserving his youth, and more infamously, injecting himself with his son's blood that one time. Not to mention the countless braindead morons who talk about uploading your consciousness to some kind of computer system, as if the philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness are just technicalities to be solved by some clever algorithm in an indeterminate future. It's down the stack, folks.
One of the few places in cyberspace where death is dealt with directly is in alt.suicide.holiday, and its descendant communities. Originating as an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup (for those of you unfamiliar, think of it as an older, peer-to-peer version of a subreddit) to discuss the spike in suicides during the holidays, it gradually morphed into a community of people discussing the philosophy of suicide, their own personal struggles with suicidal ideation, and most controversially, details and statistics about methods.
Ashers, as they call themselves, take a very different position on suicide than most. They're sometimes described as being "pro-suicide", although they'd describe themselves as "pro-choice", and continuing the abortion metaphor, they describe opponents of their position as "pro-life". In their view, suicide is a matter of personal autonomy, a decision between nobody but you and God, or the lack thereof. Damn what society, the government, and my psychologist say, it's my life, and I'll do what I please with it!
This is not an uncontroversial opinion, nor are a.s.h and its descendants uncontroversial communities. By their nature, they've been connected with scores of suicides and attempted suicides. Their members have left behind grieving family and friends, many of whom, understandably, blame the website for their loved one's death. And what is there to say to them? All the philosophizing about agency and freedom, all the quotes from Camus and Heidegger, what does any of that do to the all-consuming agony and grief of losing a parent, a sibling, a child? You want to tell me you saw my baby about to die, and you sat by and cheered them on? Fuck you, you god-damned butcher, you merchant of death. It should have been you.
An understandable position. But by virtue of their vicinity to death, ashers offer us a glimpse at a digital community that accepts it, rather than constantly trying to ignore it. Users die. Users say goodbye to others. Users are grieved. Users are remembered, fondly, by the users they left behind. All this is somewhat alien to the systems the internet is built on. One of the current incarnations of the a.s.h community is a fly-by-night operation that uses off-the-shelf forum software, so when users pass on, their accounts are merely closed, the same procedure used for users who break forum rules.
Of course, getting your account shuttered is one of the less grim fates to befall a user. Hell, your login info still works. What's to stop your digital corpse from being Weekend at Bernie's'd to spread misinformation about the disease you just died from? Who even owns your account, anyway? If you die without a will, what's to stop your transphobic parents from logging in and changing your pronouns "back" to what they "should be"? What part of your digital legacy can even be preserved? What of the dead ImageShack links to photos you treasure, your correspondences with your beloved wife on YouTube DMs? Who's going to seed your torrents when you're gone?
Questions all left unanswered by the Mount Rushmore of tech CEOs. Their best plan is Star Trek fanfiction about becoming a holodeck character, or failing that, using Chat-GPT to make a little homunculus out of the information you left with them, so that your loved ones can see some Stable Diffusion replika tell them, "I'm in heaven now! So sorry I died! I miss you so much!"
I'm not really sure what the point of this post is. Got away from me a bit while I was writing it. To be clear, I'm not advocating the pro-choice position. I don't know your circumstances, but you probably shouldn't kill yourself. If you want to, there might be solutions to your problems that are just as radical, but involve a lot less death. But no matter whether Thiel agrees, you're going to die someday. Like the Koheleth said, wise or fool, wicked or righteous, human or animal, all share the same fate. You can cling to your youth, measuring and optimizing every day, or shove a lump of pink meat in your skull into an atom scanner, but you'll eventually be buried with the rest of us. So live a beautiful life in the meantime.
P.S., there wasn't a good place to cite it in the main body, but a lot of this post was inspired by this video from Lily Alexandre. It's a good one, check it out!