Digital Immortality

When I open my iPhone’s contacts, the first name is Jackson A., a friend who died from a coke overdose in 2019.

Anytime I see his name, I think of him pulling up in his old pickup truck and us standing around shooting the shit smoking cigarettes.

He was clean for 2 years, relapsed, and died 3 days later. So it goes.

I don’t think I’ll be calling him anytime soon, but I can’t seem to delete the contact.

I still have my grandfather’s number saved and he’s been dead since 2015.

I can remember sitting in his office learning how to use Photoshop when I was 12 years old. I still remember our last conversation on the phone like it was yesterday.

I guess this habit of keeping dead contacts is semi-sentimental and is also slightly wasteful for my phone’s memory, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that does it.

It’s hard to delete contacts of dead friends and relatives.

It’s like the visceral feeling of deleting photos of you and an ex.

Except you can’t drunk call the dead.

I remember seeing one of my former camp counselors pop up on my Facebook feed. It took me a few seconds to realize he died in a motorcycle accident.

Do I remove him as a friend or do I get annoyed every year when his friends’ Miss you posts pop up on my feed?

I wasn’t that close with him so I removed him as a friend, but it still felt a little cold.

I’m at the point where I only check Facebook to see which classmates died.

Digital immorality or digital immortality?

What happens when an anon account’s owner dies?

How do their friends grieve? Does the account live on?

Last week, I explored these questions with Late Checkout via a short piece of fiction titled Funeral of a CryptoPunk.  

When I registered my stock trading account, I chose who gets my money when I die. Should we be implementing a similar protocol for Twitter and Substack?

When I die, I don’t want to stop posting content.

I want my ideas to live on. I want my writing to be read 100 years into the future.

Even after my death, I want to be making my audience laugh and think new thoughts.

To keep posting content posthumously, I have 2 options:

1. Assign the accounts to a close friend or family member

2. Schedule content for the next 100 years

Hopefully, by the time I’m an old man, I’ll have kids or grandkids that could keep my accounts alive.

But right now, I’m 24 and *knock on wood* not having kids anytime soon.

If I died tomorrow, what would happen to my Twitter and Substack?

Do I need to leave them in my will to someone?

Perhaps I could leave them to a friend, but I trust software more than people.

For now, I’ll stick to scheduling content for the next 50 years and hope for the best.

The Atlantic published an article titled QR Codes for the Dead in 2014 showing graves with QR codes on them.

I think this is fucking beautiful.

I know I’d like a QR code on my grave that links to my writing and a VR representation of my life… maybe even an NFT collection.

When I was in middle school, my dad dropped me off at Hebrew school on a Wednesday night, but after he drove off, I realized they were closed.

My phone was dead and I was a bit scared, but I sucked it up and walked 30 minutes back to my dad’s house through a graveyard and the woods.

Now at 24, I like to walk my dog in the graveyard on my street.

My ex found this behavior kinda strange, but I find it surprisingly stoic.

I can kick back and listen to music or a podcast and there’s no one to bother me because they’re all six feet under1.

Would graveyards lose their calmness if there were QR codes on the graves?

Would they become tourist traps? Or scavenger hunt grounds?

If I’m a teenager in 2032, the first thing I’m doing with my friends is getting stoned and going to a graveyard to go on a VR tour of dead peoples’ lives.

A few weeks ago, #MacMiller was trending on Twitter.

Mac died in 2018 and while his family has since released two albums, there was nothing significant that came out a few weeks ago. He was just trending.

I had dinner in NYC a few days ago and they played 2 of his songs on the speakers.

Fan accounts still post daily memes and photos.

He has 18M+ monthly listeners on Spotify.

It feels like XXXTENTACION and Juice WRLD’s estates have released more music since they died than when they were alive.

We live in the age of digital immortality.

Our digital identities and online work live past our physical deaths.

What dead writers will people be reading in 2122?

Which dead YouTubers will they be watching?

Which dead singers will they be listening to?

I dropped a new podcast featuring startup founder Jamey Gannon.

We chat all things creator economy, TikTok, dropping out, and freelancing.

It’s a short one jam-packed with lots of lessons about how the internet works.