Things to do in the Digital Afterlife when you're dead: Presentation at International Symposium of Electronic Art, Istanbul 2011: There are currently few procedures or public awareness about what happens to online digital identities after death. This paper discusses what happens with personal electronic information after death and looks to what is argued to be the rapidly approaching digital Afterlife. This afterlife of new emergent behaviour offers a challenge of almost unimaginable scope to the creative vision of Artists, Philosophers, Technologists and Cultural thinkers.

1. Things to do in the digital
afterlife when you’re dead
Dan Buzzo
daniel.buzzo@uwe.ac.uk

2. This is me*
* also available without hair.

3. this is also me.

4. So, what is it that makes us, us ?

5. These are all parts of ‘Us’
What we say and do, the things we make, what we express.

6. Taking this idea of how we define ourselves.
who we are does not stop at the edge of our skin

7. ‘Consciousness is not restricted to the brain.’
‘Consciousness is the function of an organism, not an organ.’
Pepperell

8. The human organism is changing.
For millions of years we have been augmenting our
physical abilities

9. After we started augmenting our physical abilities we
started on our mental abilities

10. Originally we extended our lives by writing & publishing
static, analogue data
Now we create active, digital data that is fluid and alive.
Increasingly our lives are being lived and
expressed digitally.

11. What happens next ?
Since before history mankind has asked the question

12. Ideas and references to it are everywhere around us,
in art, language, literature, culture and philosophy
We want and need an afterlife

13. We can still interact with something of them but
their legacy personalities are ‘passive’ like the
media they used to extend themselves.
Previous generations have lived on after their
deaths though the extensions of their selves they
generated during their lives.

14. Digital is not by its nature a passive medium
The Digital Afterlife ?

15. ownership of our data is currently problematic but
significant efforts are underway to consolidate and
bring personal data under our own control

16. focused on semantics and interoperability

17. “People lie. People are lazy. People are stupid,
know thyself is a tall order and people are
notoriously poor at describing themselves and
their own behaviour. Schemas aren't neutral.
Metrics influence results. There's more than one
way to describe something”
Cory Doctorow
Unfortunately for the semantic web…

18. We are beginning to externalise preferences in a
dynamic way

19. Simple emergent behaviour is already happening

20. In the future ideas of a digital afterlife are ever-present.

21. Take control of your own information
Short term

22. aggregate and collate personal information in a useful way
Mid term

23. Long term
‘Digital natives’ are born into this analogue/digital way of being.

24. The current generation of digital natives
have new perceptions…

25. …of the personal, social, political,
economic and even the physical.

26. Why not also the corporeal ?

27. Not as continuity…
…but as metamorphosis

28. Thank you
Dan Buzzo
daniel.buzzo@uwe.ac.uk
In memory of Pete Fern
King of the Bristol geeks