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The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality

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The speaker reflects on their journey of exploring the intersection of the internet and death, beginning in graduate school after the loss of a mentor, Richard Harvey Brown. They were inspired to analyze how social media serves as a space for mourning and remembrance when individuals die or go missing. Initially anxious about the lack of existing literature, the speaker ultimately wrote their dissertation on disaster news coverage and later returned to the topic for their second book, focusing on the concept of "digital death."

The exploration notes that much of the academic work on digital death has centered on how the living interact with the deceased's digital footprints, but less attention has been given to the agency of the dying and the dead themselves. The speaker delves into various digital expressions surrounding death, including blogs by the terminally ill and digital suicide notes, and investigates emerging technologies aimed at post-mortem messaging and mind uploading.

They describe the evolving understanding of legacy in the digital age, where anyone can strive for remembrance, extending beyond the traditionally powerful or heroic figures. The speaker discusses the challenges of achieving genuine digital immortality, emphasizing that while technology allows for innovative expressions of legacy, these records are often impermanent, as websites and data can disappear.

The speaker also raises concerns about digital legacy being commodified or overly individualistic, urging people to consider their contributions to the world beyond personal legacies. They advocate for thinking about mortality in communal terms and addressing real-world problems to ensure that any digital afterlife reflects positive contributions to society. Ultimately, the discussion highlights the complexities of integrating technology with our understanding of death and remembrance, challenging individuals to thoughtfully engage with their digital legacies and broader impacts on the world.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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A long time ago, when I first started graduate school,

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I worked for a very brilliant,

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professor named Richard Harvey Brown.

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And, sadly he passed away at the, toward the end

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of my time working there.

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Um, this is around 2003.

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And, one of the things I was asked to do then was

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to create a website, that would contain his, you know,

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cv, other information about him,

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some unpublished works that, he wasn't able to finish

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before he, before he died.

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Um, so I guess that got me thinking about the ways

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that the internet was gonna change

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or might be changing our relationships with death.

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I took a little bit of time off from academia,

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and when I went back to finish my PhD at the City University

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of New York, I wrote a paper, a conference paper,

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this is, I guess around 2007, about a few case studies

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where people, young people had died or gone missing,

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and their social media pages became like these gathering

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points for, their friends

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and family, to talk about them

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or try to figure out what happened or anything like that.

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But at the time, there really wasn't any other literature,

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that I could find, people doing this kind of work.

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And as a graduate

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student, I was, that made me a little nervous.

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So I, I ended up writing my dissertation,

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which became my first book on a,

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I guess a only slightly less macabre topic,

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news coverage of disasters.

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And then, I always kind of thought I would come back

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to it, after the first book, which I did.

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So the, this is my second book,

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and this is, the, that's what spurred I guess,

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the digital departed.

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So when I came back to the topic, then there was a growing,

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literature and pretty robust literature out there.

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There were a lot of academics doing work in this general

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area,

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but most of that work was focused on,

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how someone's social media page becomes kind of a space

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for mourning and grieving for the living, right?

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How the living engage with the, what's left behind

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by the, the dead, right?

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Um, but there wasn't a lot of work, on how

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the dying and the dead themselves,

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have agency in these things.

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Um, and so I started to think about that end of things

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and try to find, places where people,

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well, I looked at things like blogs of the terminally ill,

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digital suicide notes, things like that.

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Um, so I went about kind of combing the internet

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for examples of, of these that I could kind of analyze

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and look at the discourse and try

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to understand the different themes that were in these kinds

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of, digital engagements with death and dying.

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Um, and also then I kind of, for some

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of the more future oriented, cutting edge stuff,

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I entered, I ended up interviewing, entrepreneurs

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who were working these spaces.

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So people who are working on like postmortem messaging

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or even, the idea of mind uploading

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where you might be able to preserve your brain

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and get it eventually, uploaded into a computer

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or something to kind of keep yourself

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Going. Digital

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death is a kind of

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grassroots, populist, democratizing thing, right?

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For, for most of human history, if you wanted to be

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remembered by people other than those closest to you,

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you had to be powerful, or maybe exceptionally heroic

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or something like that, right?

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Um, but you know, a lot of what I've seen in the data

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that's in my book, and the people

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and the stories behind it are, you know, everyday people

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figuring out ways to use the internet to say like, you know,

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I'm worthy of being remembered too.

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I want some kind of, you know, virtual immortality

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for myself as well.

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And kind of expanding the idea of who gets to be remembered,

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who gets to craft a legacy for themselves.

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Um, so that to me is what's kind of new

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or interesting about digital death especially.

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It's not that, you know, the idea of using

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communication technologies to be remembered, started

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with the internet like far from it.

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But, the idea that anyone could do this, with,

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you know, relatively little resources behind it,

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that I think is pretty new

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and interesting as long as there have been, you know,

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anatomically modern humans, been,

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using communication technology as long

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as we define technology broadly enough, right?

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Like, if we think about Red Ochre as a pigment,

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that shows up all over, you know, prehistoric grave sites,

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in the bodies that are buried in the grave sites on,

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you know, cave walls in the drawings

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that prehistoric peoples used there or made there.

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And so, we don't really know, obviously the,

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the substance of what was being communicated in, you know,

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in those drawings, or by the way

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that bodies were adorned with this pigment.

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But it's pretty clear that they are, you know,

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talking about death

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and perhaps even trying to talk to the people

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who have died, right?

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Um, so I think that, yeah, there's, you know, as long

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as there've been humans, they've

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been doing that sort of thing.

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Now, of course, different technologies have different sorts

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of affordances and can change this kind of relationships.

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So, if we think about, you know, the written word

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and the alphabet and things like that, obviously that

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greatly changes the ways

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that we can think about communicating with the dead,

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or that the dead can communicate with us, right?

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It creates this problem of like absent presence,

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that your words can be places that you aren't, right?

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And, you know, in some ways that does allow you

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to communicate from beyond the grave,

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but if you just think of like a will, right?

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Suddenly you're getting instructions from someone who's dead

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about, you know, how to proceed when they're gone.

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Um, and so that notion

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of absent presence figures prominently in the book,

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at least the, the book's historical chapter, you know,

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a continued into the Victorian era,

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people would experiment with new

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technologies like photography.

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Uh, there was a whole sort of genre of photography

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where you would pose with the

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recently deceased corpse of a family member

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Or a friend before you buried them, right?

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Oftentimes kind of simulating

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that they were still a lit alive

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that continued a after World War.

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I, there's been an argument that there's kind

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of a retrenchment of some of that experimentation,

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that there's a period of kind of death denial,

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a a medicalization of death,

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death moves into hospitals and things like that.

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Um, so, but at the same time, I think the, the actual kind

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of internet, digital death kind of movement comes along

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with a, I guess, a backlash to that backlash

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or a sort of, you know, reassessment of the place

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of death in modern life.

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If you think about, you know, the modern hospice movement

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that starts in the sixties,

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or even more recently, things like death cafes,

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where people are kind of encouraging, you know,

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a change in norms where, you know, death shouldn't be

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hidden from view, death shouldn't be something

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stigmatized, something that we don't talk about.

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Um, I think all of that kind of set the stage for the sorts

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of, you know, experimentation

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and innovation that you see today.

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Uh, and that the book talks about one of the more,

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most interesting cases that was covered a little bit in the

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press, was a guy named Martin Manley.

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Um, he, was a, I mean,

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I think he had a number of jobs,

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but he was a sports journalist.

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Uh, he created some basketball metrics.

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He was like a basketball journalist,

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and did some other things, but he, got very

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worried about the idea of growing old

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and losing his faculties.

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And so he created this immense website all about his life,

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all about, you know, basically anything

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that anyone would ever wonder about him

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and, set it to go online the day that he killed himself.

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And, you know, it became this kind of huge legacy.

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And he speaks explicitly about, you know, creating a legacy

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for himself, making sure that his, you know,

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his life was understood on his own terms, making sure

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that, anyone who, he even says anyone who wants

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to study suicide notes, I'm sure you must be out there

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that you know this is for you too.

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Um, so yeah, I mean, that's one of the more sort of,

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interesting case studies in the, in the book.

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Um, there are other people, of course,

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there are bloggers who are, you know, terminally ill

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who really talk about thinking through what it does to the,

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to the, their sense of themselves

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and how being ill kind of changes who they are.

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And it's not always, you know,

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framed in even a bad way, right?

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They, they've like come to realize some things

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that only people who are facing their own mortality have

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come to realize,

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and they're trying to share them in these blogs.

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Um, so there are, you know, I mean, there's a lot

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of like really rich

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and often, often very like, sad stories, in the book.

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And I think for some people,

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especially people working in, you know, when I talk

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to the people who were kind of in the field of

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Mind uploading, to some of them, it's sort

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of like just seeing what can be accomplished

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or just being, you know, against the idea

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that you would die without doing everything you

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could not to, right?

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Like that, that it just seemed to them to be kind of a waste

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to just accept the realities

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of death at a moment when at least they felt, you know,

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we're on the precipice

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of some real important technological developments

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that could ultimately lead, you know,

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to some breakthroughs

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or to your sort of digital re animation

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or, you know, all kinds of sort of sci-fi concepts.

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So some of those people are, you know, signed up

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with a company called Alco that will preserve you,

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when you die or preserve your brain

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because they know we're not quite there yet,

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but they're hoping, you know, maybe 50 years down the line,

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we might be able to,

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be digitally reborn in those ways.

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You know, I'm not that sort of scientist,

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but I tried to learn as much as I could about it,

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and I don't think that we are,

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I remain pretty skeptical.

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And that part of the book was kind of tricky to write

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because on the one hand, I really,

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I thought these people were really interesting,

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and the things they were saying were fascinating.

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I, you know, I also felt like I should not be just

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completely credulous about it.

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And, and you can find, you know, other scientists

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who are like, look, the brain isn't a computer.

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It doesn't work that way.

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It's, that's a metaphor that we understand,

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just like people used to think the brain was a series

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of gears, or the brain was electricity,

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or, you know, the metaphors are always contemporary

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with the technology that we're using.

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Um, so I'm still somewhat skeptical about that.

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Um, but, you know, there are people working hard on it.

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From my vantage. Digital immortality is more

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of an idea than a reality, right?

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I mean, 'cause in the end, links rot websites go, you know,

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the, someone stops paying the bill eventually.

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I mean, even Martin Manley,

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who I discussed a a little bit ago, when there was a lot

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of, publicity, Yahoo was gonna shut the site down,

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and then some other people cloned it

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and put it up in other spaces.

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So, you know, it's more about sort of

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being able to s solve your own fears of death, I think,

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rather than really achieving some kind

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of lasting immortality.

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Uh, I spoke with people who work in the, space

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of post-mortem messaging,

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and, you know, many of the companies

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that initially came out offering

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that service aren't around anymore.

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Um, so again, it's, it's, it's still pretty difficult

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to achieve digital posterity, just like, you know,

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anything on the web, huge portions

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of the web have been lost to history and not archived.

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And there's only, you know, basically one website that tries

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to archive, you know, a tiny fragment of

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what we've put online.

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So, the idea that we know

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you in some really full rich sense are gonna be preserved

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online is still, I think, doesn't mesh with

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how online really works.

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Um, but I do think, you know, it's good

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that more people can at least experiment with that,

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that they can play around with the idea of

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what is my legacy gonna be?

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What am I gonna leave behind?

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The fact that you have things to leave behind that

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previous generations didn't, all kinds of photos

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and all kinds of, you know, writing

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and all kinds of, other data playlists

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and things like that even, right?

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So I think that's good.

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I think it's interesting too that more people than ever have

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that, offered to them.

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Um, and I, I guess the only thing,

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the only other thing I worry about

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with digital immortality is that, it'll get kind

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of swallowed up by a handful of companies that, you know,

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largely control the internet as we speak.

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I hope readers will think about their own digital legacies.

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I mean, I don't have any kind

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of like prescriptive tips about

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how you should handle your own, digital legacies.

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I mean, whether you should, you know,

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make sure your passwords are all passed on,

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or how you wanna safeguard all that kind of stuff.

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I mean, some people might wanna be more mysterious about it

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or leave things up to fate,

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and I, I think that can be okay too.

13:00.545 --> 13:03.605
Um, you know, I hope that whatever people do that they'll

13:04.135 --> 13:06.525
think carefully about it, at least, right?

13:06.555 --> 13:07.925
Make a decision and,

13:07.945 --> 13:10.325
and perhaps consult their loved ones about it too.

13:11.065 --> 13:15.485
Um, and then I guess like more broadly, you know, I hope

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that people will think about their own mortality in more

13:17.845 --> 13:19.485
than just individualistic terms.

13:19.905 --> 13:22.445
Um, you know, you aren't actually gonna live forever.

13:22.625 --> 13:24.845
You may be able to stretch out the period in which people

13:24.865 --> 13:26.765
are talking and thinking about you and,

13:26.785 --> 13:30.085
and maybe able to expand it beyond the kind of small circle

13:30.185 --> 13:32.125
of like intimate family

13:32.145 --> 13:33.765
and friends that, that prior

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generations had to be content with.

13:35.865 --> 13:38.365
Um, but again, that's only kind of a temporary salve

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for our fears of death, right?

13:40.025 --> 13:43.765
Um, and so I think like there's a small tendency

13:43.765 --> 13:46.045
for this kind of stuff to be very individualistic

13:46.045 --> 13:48.325
and to pull us away from, you know, other kind

13:48.325 --> 13:49.965
of good questions that people have asked

13:50.545 --> 13:52.565
of their lives at the end of their lives.

13:52.715 --> 13:55.125
Like, was I a small part of efforts

13:55.185 --> 13:56.765
to make the world a better place, right?

13:56.795 --> 13:58.685
Like that kind of stuff, you know,

13:58.685 --> 14:00.165
because ultimately the digital world

14:00.975 --> 14:04.285
still reflects the problems of the physical world.

14:04.585 --> 14:08.045
And if we want any, you know, portion of our digital selves

14:08.105 --> 14:11.605
to like, live on in some kind of digital afterlife, you,

14:11.625 --> 14:13.645
you know, I make the case that you've gotta fix the

14:13.645 --> 14:14.845
problems of the physical world too.

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You've gotta try to make that world a better place,

14:17.345 --> 14:18.525
you know, while you're still in it.

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