Layers of death underlie the floating signifier that is called AI, from deepfake resurrections based on undead data to algorithmically assisted death and the hastening of climate catastrophe. Tech companies control digital legacies. At the same time, grassroots organizing by users and workers has remade digital platforms as places for memorialization and resistance. The pervasive hype around generative AI obscures the material effects of mining the dead for data to produce models and to ultimately replace living workers, the colonial histories behind applying AI systems to military actions, and the contribution of data centers to ecological destruction. Have we finally reached the limit of the cloud as a computing metaphor, and how can we move beyond the cloud's mirage toward justice for the living and the dead?
In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This and Beyond, I examined the role of platform decay and web ephemerality in shaping long-term online memorialization cultures. In the early aughts, it was mourning users who first pushed platforms to recognize dead users as significant parts of a platform’s value; social data allowed the dead to remain productive. Commercial platforms, based in the United States and in Silicon Valley in particular, intervene in people’s individual and collective mourning rituals around the world, built on global supply chains of extraction and precarious labor, e.g. content moderators in the majority world. Tech leaders, their policy and trust & safety teams, and platforms’ commercial viability are often the actors ultimately determining the appearance and longevity of those memorials while future generations provide the continual upkeep that digital heirlooms require.
Is Data Really Forever?
There are tensions inherent to a cultural fantasy of digital immortality that depends on the fragile commercial web. After the rise of social media, startup companies fashioned chatbot versions of the dead while attempting to pass digital assets on across generations, but most of these companies disappeared long before they could broker intergenerational transfers.
The concept of digital immortality ignores material barriers and the realities of climate change, which would impact the ability of servers to persist in the long term. Along with the breakdown of data infrastructures over time, the loss of data or connections as devices fail and people forget, there is also the problem of the resources used to build and sustain the infrastructures that hold the data of the living and the dead. The accumulation of data is a source of power for corporations at the same time it is a liability. AI takes water from drought-stricken areas. Data centers are sucking up water, land, and energy, draining resources from neighboring communities. But, as I have noted elsewhere, companies like Google are also changing some of their policies around permanent data storage, rethinking the promise of digital eternity.
Putting the Dead to Work
With the generative AI hype cycle, there is even more of a sense that AI can be used to revive the dead at the same time AI’s material effects are contributing to climate change at a pivotal moment. Companies are not letting the dead rest. Generative AI is imagined to be a way to create chatbots of dead relatives and, increasingly, to do the work of humans. The data of the dead can be used to write scripts or novels or appear in movies long after the death of a referent. Using AI to replace living workers with dead ones has become a site of contestation for labor unions such as SAG-AFTRA and WGA. Generative AI exposes long-standing extractive processes by which the dead are put to work.
Resisting Algorithms
In my book’s conclusion, I pointed to some of the ways that platforms intervened in people’s death, pointing to algorithmic management practices that encourage risk-taking by gig workers. AI has the capacity to enact tangible harms, to kill. Tech companies have control over people’s legacies and may decide to delete or modify their digital possessions or memorials. But tech companies also have more direct control over people’s lives and deaths. Scholars such as Tung Hui-Hu have long observed the metaphors of death involved in internet culture that also point to the necropolitical nature of cloud computing, its use in military operations and the targeting of dissidents.
Workers and users also repurpose platforms and find symbols of resistance even through the same commercial platforms that might suppress or recuperate their agendas. For example, activist communities use GoFundMe campaigns and harness virality for mutual aid. TikTok is a site of exploitation and necromancy but it is also a source of financial and political support for humanitarian causes. Twitter is a means of circulating pleas for help and goodbye messages to a callous world. Platforms provide documentation of people’s lives and deaths, and become memorials and records after the fact. This is why the erasure of Twitter archives and the ephemerality of websites is so politically dangerous.
AI Abolition in the Face of Mass Death
AI kills people and then extracts from them further, which has spurred abolitionist movements. Tech workers refuse the deadly nature of cloud computing when it comes to the application of Google and Amazon’s technology to military purposes. They are also pushing back against their employers’ disregard for the ecological destruction connected to their data centers: Microsoft workers are quitting over GenAI’s role in rising emissions. Students are calliing for divestment from fossil fuels and from genocide, and tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are at the center of these issues. There are abolitionist tendencies in movements such as No Tech for Apartheid and #TechWon’tBuildIt, but also in movements against the use of generative AI to revive the dead, pushing back against being turned into a chatbot or having one’s likeness used for commercial purposes after death. Movements are using algorithmic manipulation for attention and the redirecting of resources, relying on platform-based memorials as a form of witnessing, while there is also a collective movement toward abolition, away from AI’s obfuscation of death.
References
Hu, T.H. (2015). A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kneese, T. (2023). Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kneese, T. (2023). Using Generative AI to Resurrect the Dead Will Create a Burden for the Living. Wired, August 21, https://www.wired.com/story/using-generative-ai-to-resurrect-the-dead-will-create-a-burden-for-the-living/
Kugler, L. (2024). Raising the Dead with AI. Communications of the ACM, April 1, https://cacm.acm.org/news/raising-the-dead-with-ai/.
Suchman, L. (2023). The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI. Big Data & Society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794