Book World: 'Death Glitch' Looks At What Happens After We've Logged Off For Good
I have a photo of a visit to the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. It's not the grave of Eva "Evita" Perón, or the many other haunted cemeteries that house other famous political and cultural figures. Instead, the only thing of concern in Recoleta, as far as I can tell, is a pasted-up, blurry shot of a painting by the lesser-known sculptor Gevorg Rostamian, which includes a link to a geographic city and postal address. Yahoo Mail's GOCs page has been inactive for over a decade. Use an email address.
The number of dead accounts for a surprising number of Internet users: it is estimated that the number of dead users on Facebook alone will exceed the number of people alive by 2070. But the Internet is not prepared for them. If the first payment is late, the hosting service will close the personal website. The photo-sharing service is password-retrievable and stubbornly refuses to allow family members to access accounts. LinkedIn profiles appear on recommendations from people they know and stalk their peers.
"The Problem of Death: How Technological Solutions Fail in This Life and Beyond" by technologist Tamara Kness presents compelling case studies of how technology breaks down in the face of the chaos of extinction. The topic is broad and Kneese tries to make up for the lack of other texts by exploring four different topics: social media commemoration, pathological blogging, digital real estate management, and transhumanism. While the stories never coalesce into a single narrative, one theme stands out: the cause of this "deadly decline" is not inevitable failure, but corporate myopia. In this way, Rostamian's inactive registration is not only an ill-advised guess as to which websites will survive, but also the result of Yahoo's cost-cutting measures, first by shutting down its unprofitable web hosting services and purging email. It is not active. Account
Kniz captures the conflict between online capital and death in his description of the digital asset management cottage industry. In the 2000s and 2010s, a wave of startups emerged to help customers provide surviving passwords, photos, last wishes and other digital remains. Featuring surprising Silicon Valley names like Dead Man's Switch and iCroak, these companies combine 20th-century life insurance business models with 21st-century marketing to talk about personal care and productivity hacks.
Kneez, like any good anthropologist, subscribed to many of these platforms and proved them wrong on their own. At one point, he received an e-mail saying, "Dead Man Switch is worried about you," advising that if he didn't respond within a week, the service would post any messages he chose after death. Thankfully, Kinsey found the email and it didn't contain a dark secret or a last wish as the company had suggested. If he did, they went to the former.
It goes without saying that every digital real estate startup Kennys has tried has gone out of business. As he writes, "Digital real estate can only survive as long as there are no business platforms and services based on it. The startup structure favors short-term life and market savvy, which these companies are equipped to shepherd." ."
Kneiz consistently highlights the design challenges of killer technology, but leaves little in doubt as to how the company will address those challenges. For example, the first chapter discusses the evolution of Facebook's policies regarding the profiling of deceased users. First, if Facebook learns that a user has died, it will silently delete their profile after a 30-day grace period. But the company revised its policy in 2007, after the Virginia Tech shooting, when victims' profiles became common areas of grief. Over the next decade and a half, Facebook introduced a number of features and design changes to better remember the profiles of deceased users and give next of kin control over them.
Here, Kneez dives into the complex questions of death on social media. What information should be stored in an alert profile and deleted for privacy reasons? How can one verify that a dead user's profile should be accepted? How should the platform protect its memory profiles from being tampered with by "RIP trolls"? Facebook appears to be seriously grappling with these questions, but Knisse describes the effort as a smart user retention play. He wrote that a warning would "draw users to an aging defect forum." "By keeping private archives, the dead can remain members of the network."
Most of Kinney's research was completed before the coronavirus pandemic, so I won't get into the latest changes to the internet, including the ever-evolving recommendation algorithms that drive most of what we see and do on internet.line. In this way, "Death Eclipse," where a person's thumbprint used to defend itself, feels like a poetic relic of the past, not temporary bait for algorithmic pools. . In Rustamyan's case, what seems archaic about the geocities' connection to the brand is not just the choice of web host, but the desire to make its online presence part of a lasting legacy.
That said, the slightly older "Death Eclipse" actually deserves more attention. Today's new AI hell, with chatbots learning to impersonate the dead with a few text messages and bringing celebrities from ex-car salesmen back to life, distracts from Kneese's most enduring point: Death illustrates the power imbalance between tech companies and their consumers. Most media critics of the tech industry today point to this weakness: social media is watching you! Hackers have your data! Big companies are very powerful! - But by focusing on death, Death Glitch offers a new perspective to re-examine the relationship.
Gabriel Nicholas is a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a non-resident fellow at New York University's Information Law Institute.
At Tamara Synagogue
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