Since their emergence, digital technologies, and specifically the internet, have both challenged traditional industries as well as allowed new industries to arise. One such industry, motivated and enabled by the spread of digital media and the internet, is the Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI). The DAI utilizes digital technologies to propose new ways to engage with death and with the dead, and thus, fosters new attitudes towards death, mourning and commemoration. This interplay between death, society and the related technology industry challenges existing perceptions of life and death, invites new professions and arguably requires new regulations.
For millennia, human societies have been searching for immortality. In the contemporary West, these hopes and stories persist, now told using the language of science and technology (Elias, 1985). Computers and the internet specifically have been associated with the idea of perfect memory and data that lives forever (Bush, 1945), allowing individuals to create and keep detailed and retrievable records of their lives for perpetuity (Van Dijck, 2005). These visions materialize with emerging digital and online media practices and services that facilitate the creation of enduring posthumous digital traces that are entangled in everyday communication practices of the living (e.g., Brubaker et al., 2013; Meese et al., 2015). This have contributed to the emergence of a Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI; Bassett, 2022; Öhman & Floridi, 2018; Savin-Baden, 2021), that with the advancement of automated computing, AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), propose responsive technologies to realize the idea of digital immortality.
In this panel, we map the Digital Afterlife Industry, its stakeholders, products, and services as well as some of its consequences and implications in terms of regulation, ethical conduct, and impact on digital media corporations. We explore the practices it potentially replaces, the new practices it enables, and the practices and industries it reshapes.
The first paper explores the field of online immortality services and the social imaginaries enabling their emergence. Drawing on a multimodal analysis of online immortality websites and in-depth interviews with designers and founders of online immortality services, the paper maps and locates these services within the Digital Afterlife Industry and explores the social imaginaries underlying these services (and their failure). The paper then reflects on the discrepancy between the promise of immortality and the actual cultural work the services do (and don’t do), which is not conducive to endurance. Finally, the paper links this discrepancy to questions of media ephemerality, sustainability, and solidarity.
After introducing the main stakeholders and promises of the industry, the second paper explores its potential clientele – the users. Studies of online engagement show that some digital platforms that were never intended to serve mourning purposes have become legitimate venues for engaging with death. On the other hand, most of the technology ventures explicitly developed to facilitate engagement with death do not survive beyond a few years. The second paper addresses these two contradicting trends in the interface of death, society, and technology by studying the attitudes of the general population, i.e., the potential users of the DAI, and their willingness to use the services that digitally defy death and enable to continue the relationships with the dead.
Understanding these conflicting attitudes towards engagement with death online calls for a deconstruction of the different positions of potential stakeholders and their needs, which could lead to new regulatory regimes. While some find comfort in the DAI’s solutions, the third paper considers the potential harm these services may cause. Recent DAI developments, such as ghostbots and DeepFake, attempt to monetize the data of the dead by digitally resuscitating them using machine learning techniques, sometimes without proper consent from users. Such use of the dead's data could cause potential harm and thus require re-thinking about privacy, property, personal data, and reputation. By considering potential benefits and harms, this paper applies a legal framework to suggest new policies in light of emerging technologies that currently lack adequate regulation.
Complementing the discussion on policy and regulation, the final paper considers the rise of a new profession as an intermediary between the users’ needs and the industry’s solutions. Through the lens of professionalization, the paper looks at both the continuities and changes within the traditional death industry and how these shape the digital afterlife industry, including new types of specialists, business models and products. The paper examines the idea of professionalization as a form of social innovation by proposing the potential emergence of digital afterlife leaders. By exploring these emerging professions and the process of professionalization, the paper explains their impact on and shaping of the future structure of the digital afterlife industry, its stakeholders and business models.
