Digital Souls

A Philosophy of Online Death

Patrick Stokes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350139169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

1

Dying online

On the morning of 15 July 1974, Florida TV anchor Christine Chubbuck pulled out a handgun and shot herself live on air. She died in hospital several hours later. Footage of this tragedy reportedly still exists, but remains locked away in a law firm’s safe. By contrast, footage of Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer fatally shooting himself in front of a horrified press pack in January 1987 is never more than a couple of clicks away.

It’s commonly said that dying, at least in the ‘Global North’, has become an increasingly private and hidden affair. Where once we died at home, and our bodies often stayed there until burial, from the early decades of the twentieth century onwards we increasingly died in hospitals.¹ Yet the internet has drastically changed the visibility of death, or at least of certain deaths. On Friday 15 March 2019, a white supremacist armed with assault weapons livestreamed himself entering two mosques in Christchurch and murdering fifty people. The New Zealand police asked media outlets not to show the livestream footage; many nonetheless did. Two days later, the website Reddit took down a subreddit (discussion page) called r/watchpeopledie for violating Reddit’s ‘policy against glorifying or encouraging violence’, after it posted the gunman’s footage.² This subreddit was known for displaying videos of gruesome deaths. In that, it was not unusual: websites such as the notorious Rotten.com had been displaying horrific footage of violent death and its aftermath since the mid-1990s. Access to such ‘forbidden’ imagery was one (thankfully small) part of the early internet’s allure.

The deaths of Chubbuck and Dwyer were sufficiently shocking in their time and context that they are still discussed today. Broadcast deaths on the internet, tragically, are common enough that they are hardly reported. On the various livestreaming platforms now available, people broadcast their own self-inflicted deaths as well as their killing of other people. Even producing internet content can be deadly, as in 2017 when Pedro Ruiz was accidentally shot dead by his girlfriend on camera during a YouTube stunt gone wrong.³

At the same time as some deaths have become more visible, there has been increasing concern about the internet profaning or intruding upon grief and death. Barak Obama was criticized in some quarters for taking a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service with the prime ministers of Denmark and the UK. You could put that down to the relentlessly partisan tribalism of our age, but the criticism also reflected anxieties over how we handle death in the social media era. Every so often an op-ed writer somewhere will decry the rise of selfies at funerals as tasteless or vapid; yet a study done on the use of ‘#funeral’ on Instagram found most photos recorded the events of dressing formally or extended families being together, not the actual funeral service.⁴ The photos ‘appeared to be efforts to communicate and share feelings of intimacy, togetherness, family, friendship, and attachment’ and ‘celebrated the deceased’s intimate and social connections and the community drawn together by the event of their passing’.⁵ Relatively few selfies featured a coffin, let alone a corpse.

But complaints that selfies are inappropriate in the context of death rituals point to something else: the sense that the internet lacks the moral seriousness needed for moments of such gravity. Selfies are seen as frivolous, flippant, self-absorbed; everything death and grieving are not. Even in societies where the bodies of the dead are not typically hidden away, sharing images of bodies online strikes some people as wrong in something like the way that sharing videos of deaths is. In Samoa, where open-casket funerals are a cultural norm, photographs and videos of dead people’s bodies are increasingly being shared on platforms like TikTok and Facebook – but some are starting to resist the trend. Samoans are used to visible corpses, yet using social media to extend that visibility feels to some Samoans at least like a violation of dignity.⁶

We can understand this concern about the dignity of the newly dead as akin to worries about nudity. J. David Velleman has argued that the reason we find the exposure of breasts and genitals (and male genitals in particular) shameful is that these parts, not being entirely within our control, remind us of our animal nature.⁷ Few things speak to our animality more than a corpse: an organism shorn of mind, reduced to pure biological form and shape. Perhaps that’s also one reason why footage of deaths upsets us so much: a feeling that the moment at which someone is reclaimed by their organic nature, reduced to matter, to mere object, is something outsiders should not be looking at.

Yet there’s also the sense that by mediating and sharing these images, we somehow dilute their reality. We reduce the end of a life and the body that remains afterwards to just one more item in an economy of ‘content’ competing for our attention. Death becomes detached from the embodied reality we live in. As Nikolaus Lehner has recently put it, ‘The reality of death and foremost, the reality of our own personal death and the death of our loved ones, strangely loses some of its significance because of this media environment. The images of death overwrite the imagination of death.’⁸ It overwrites the one who has died, too. Just as Christine Chubbock and Budd Dwyer are forever defined by their last moments, dying online can, as it were, crowd out everything that came before.

In this ‘attention economy’, to share images or footage a particular death, far from driving home its dreadful reality, can just as easily level real and fictional deaths. Most of us have at some point been emotionally moved by the death of a fictional character, but the sort of levelling I’m talking about here makes it easy to treat real deaths as if they too are fictional. When Virginia journalist Alison Parker and her cameraman Adam Ward were shot dead on live TV in August 2015, a small but vocal subset of internet users insisted the deaths were staged. It’s become surprisingly commonplace in the face of mass-casualty events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the Sandy Hook shooting, for conspiracy theorists to insist that the people on screen crying for their children or being rushed to hospital are just ‘crisis actors’ taking part in fake tragedies. One reason many of us find this so repugnant is precisely that real deaths – and accordingly real pain – are being handled as if they are just another image for consumption and critique.⁹ Real-life tragedy and grisly fantasy are treated as being on the same level. Electronic media can bring death home to us, but it can also detach those deaths from reality altogether.

This points to one of the major hurdles to the idea of surviving death online: the sense that the online world is unreal, or at least less real. When it comes to death, that sense pervades not just the mediated deaths we see on our screens, but also the ways we mourn people online, and how we deal with cases of actual fakery that sometimes cross our path.

Online mourning and trolling

On 24 February 2012, just a week after the online public mourning of Whitney Houston, British comedian Michael Legge announced the death of ‘Gregg Jevin, a man I just made up’ – sparking an outbreak of mock grief. Twitter users lamented how impossible it was to imagine a world without Gregg Jevin in it, or wondered how they’d break the news to their also-imaginary children. Businesses and brands got into the action; even the BBC tweeted news of the death.¹⁰ A few users even threw in the sort of predictable contrarian tweets that always follow celebrity deaths: for instance, ‘Tory sell-out. Good riddance’ by @mrmarksteel, or ‘Oh please, spare me the orgy of false grief. Thousands of made-up people die every day and no-one tweets about them at all’ by, uh, @patstokes.

The Gregg Jevin affair exposed something very interesting that perhaps wasn’t obvious to Twitter users before: Twitter mourning as a practice was less than six years old, but people already knew its conventions well enough to parody them. We could only make these jokes because we knew what sincere Twitter grief looked like. But the existence of these jokes, and the way in which fairly mainstream, image-conscious organizations got involved, also suggests that online mourning was seen as fair game for satire, in a way that would likely be pointless or crass if directed at more familiar forms of public grief. What is it about online mourning that might make it seem a more deserving target for this sort of humour?

Researchers across a range of fields including sociology, psychology and anthropology have studied the nature of online mourning quite extensively. We’ll touch on social media mourning practices a little later in this book, but online mourning is a much wider category than just social media. Mourning practices exist on platforms ranging from early web-based condolence books and online obituaries to elaborate Minecraft mausoleums and commemorative non-playable characters in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs).¹¹ All of these throw up philosophically intriguing questions about identity, action and ethics; for instance, World of Warcraft players have found themselves caught up in fierce debates over the ethics of staging ambush attacks on in-game funerals, held for players who have died ‘in real life’.¹²

While some forms of online mourning are extensions of pre-internet mourning practices, others are new. That in turn has allowed for some positive developments. Supportive communities of mourning can spring up in unexpected places, bringing together bereaved people who would never have met otherwise.¹³ Even the video-sharing behemoth YouTube, a site not exactly known for its polite and supportive comment culture, has helped people dealing with loss to connect and draw strength from each other.¹⁴ One thing the internet has been particularly helpful at is proving spaces for ‘disenfranchised grief’: grieving by people who are not entitled to mourn according to prevailing social standards or assumptions.¹⁵ Grief might be viewed as illegitimate because of who is being mourned (a pet, for instance), or the mourner may not have the ‘right’ sort of relationship to the deceased (such as an extramarital partner). The online world creates new places for these excluded mourners to congregate and to express what they’re feeling. The flipside of this, though, is that online mourning spaces can be also accessed by mourners who the bereaved may reasonably want to keep excluded, such as people involved in the death itself.¹⁶

When Gregg Jevin ‘died’, those of us who got into the game were play-acting what psychologists call ‘parasocial grief’. A parasocial relationship is one-sided: you may consider yourself Adam Driver’s biggest fan or a fervently devoted subject of the Queen, but neither, mostly likely, has ever heard of you.¹⁷ Not all parasocial grief is directed towards celebrities, however. Non-famous people who die in high-profile accidents or murders can become the focus of online grieving even where none of the mourners had even heard of the deceased before they died.¹⁸ Memorial Facebook pages, for instance, pop up and grow rapidly following a heavily publicized death, despite the page creators having no direct connection to the person they’re mourning.

Parasocial grief can look bewildering, even absurd, to outsiders.¹⁹ That in turn makes the mourner appear somehow suspect to onlookers: suspect rationally if they’re grieving for an improper object of mourning, and morally if someone is seen as grandstanding or insinuating themselves into someone else’s tragedy. On social media, that can lead to a degree of ‘grief policing’. Some users will take it upon themselves to try to pull anyone into line who they see as mourning inappropriately – for instance by displaying ‘excessive’ sadness for someone they never knew personally, or getting upset about someone who is ‘just’ an actor or musician.²⁰ People who did in fact know the deceased personally can also become distressed by strangers assuming a too-easy intimacy.²¹

A more extreme and altogether more distressing response to parasocial grief is the practice of ‘RIP trolling’. The term ‘trolling’ has mutated over the years, but in something close to its original sense it refers to an irony-soaked, self-consciously provocative (and often racist, misogynistic and homophobic) practice of online harassment. In RIP trolling, the troll(s) deliberately disrupts an online memorial space by posting offensive comments about the dead person, obscene imagery and so on. When twenty-year-old Oliva Burt died in an accident outside a Durham nightclub in February 2018, her family’s pain was compounded by a troll calling her a ‘prostitute’ and posting cruel images. When caught, it turned out the troll, a thirty-eight-year-old man, had targeted other bereaved families over the previous four years; he was sentenced to fourteen months’ jail.²²

RIP trolling emerged from a subculture driven first and foremost by the pursuit of ‘lulz’, the desire to provoke reactions that amuse the troll and their confederates. The ethos of trolling is a sort of aggressive anti-earnestness: nothing is to be taken seriously, even death itself. But interestingly, as Whitney Phillips found during her ethnographic exploration of troll communities, some RIP trolls justify their actions by insisting that what goes on online is not ‘real’ grief:

As I found, the vast majority of trolls’ RIP energies were directed at these ‘grief tourists’, users who had no real-life connection to the victim and who, according to the trolls, could not possibly be in mourning. As far as these trolls were concerned, grief tourists were shrill, disingenuous, and, unlike grieving friends and families, wholly deserving targets. The much-ridiculed statement ‘I didn’t know you but I’m very sorry you’re dead’ was therefore seen as a declaration of trollability.²³

What connects all of these disparate modern phenomena – complaints about funeral selfies, the willingness to joke about death in the case of ‘Gregg Jevin’, grief-policing and RIP trolling – is a generalized anxiety over the realness of the online world. This attitude was already in evidence even in the pre-Facebook era, when technology scholar danah boyd was researching the early social network Friendster: ‘In discussing Fakesters, Batty was quick to point out that there’s no such thing as an authentic performance on Friendster – “None of this is real.”’²⁴

Fake deaths

‘Fakesters’ were Friendster users who, for a v...