DIGITAL DEATH: TRANSFORMING HISTORY, RITUALS AND AFTERLIFE CONFERENCE

Abstract: 

Preserving digital remains requires specialized forms of care, involving networked labor and data infrastructures. Tech companies often control what digital legacies look like and how long they are maintained. At the same time, grassroots organizing by users and workers has remade platforms as places for memorialization and resistance. I offer platform necropolitics to capture the fast and slow deaths attached to digital supply chains and algorithmic systems, and the ways that individuals and communities are metabolized by such systems after they die. The pervasive hype around generative AI obscures the material effects of mining the dead for data to produce models, the colonial histories behind applying AI systems to military action, 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? 

Bio: 

Tamara Kneese the director of Data & Society Research Institute's Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and a faculty member in the Master in Design for Responsible AI program at ELISAVA in Barcelona. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023) and the co-editor of The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century (School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press, 2022). 

Tamara holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, Cultural Studies, and the International Journal of Communication, and in popular outlets such as The Baffler, Wired, and Logic Magazine. In her spare time, she is an organizer with the Tech Workers Coalition.

Tal Morse (PhD). A media and communication researcher; teaches at Hadassah Academic College and at Shamoon College of Engineering (Israel). A visiting-fellow at the Centre for Death & Society (CDAS) at the University of Bath (UK). His research focuses on media and death, namely the regulation of digital remains, posthumous communication technologies and mediated death rituals. Received his PhD from the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science (2015). Author of The Mourning News: Reporting Violent Death in a Global Age (2017).

Twitter: @TlMrs

Abstract: 

The rise of AI-driven chatbots based on the digital remains of dead internet users has created a great deal of anxiety. Commentators have suggested that ‘deathbots’ will both complicate grief for the living and treat the dead as replaceable. Such concerns tacitly assume deathbots could become so convincing as to make us forget we are not talking to the dead person themselves – that is, that they could create a compelling sense of the presence of the dead. Is this assumption justified? We might think that, outside of séance rooms and ghost stories at least, we don’t have any experience of being present with the dead against which we could compare a deathbot. Yet a remarkably large number of grieving people do, in fact, experience the presence of the dead, in what are called ‘bereavement hallucinations.’ By considering the phenomenology of these hallucinations, we can get a sense of just how convincing or otherwise a deathbot might be.

Bio: 

Patrick Stokes is associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include personal identity, philosophy of death, moral psychology, and Kierkegaard. His most recent book is Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (Bloomsbury, 2021). Stokes is also a writer, radio producer, and media commentator on philosophical issues.

Amanda Lagerkvist is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies and a founder of existential media studies. She is the author of Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP 2022). Current work explores biometric AI; relations between technology, disability, and selfhood; and between the ambivalent AI imaginary, futures and endings.

Digital media are now integral to death, grief and memory, from personal illness blogs and live-streamed funerals to online support groups and virtual memorials. Studying death online involves attention to cultural change, identity performances, social bonding, legal matters, design innovations, business opportunities and more. 

The Death Online Research Network was founded in Copenhagen in 2013 to encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media. In order to establish a strong research network and influence the field of research, DORN has articulated the following goals:

• To gather the academic work already done in this area
• To support the necessary interdisciplinarity in dealing with death online
• To support a digital platform (initially Facebook) for network communication 
• To encourage subgroups to cooperate on projects, papers, panels, and publications
• To arrange physical symposiums to encourage knowledge sharing and cooperation.
• To arrange ph.d. workshops and, in other ways, support young scholars in the field.