The pleasures of virtual immortality
On the digital afterlife and everything in it
MY PHONE CLEARY KNEW I had recently visited Highgate cemetery. Last summer, I often walked through Waterlow Park, but would eventually get bored by the rumpus of the living and want to be around dead people instead. Into the cemetery I would trot. Later, my phone seemed to want to show me graveyard content. Many doors to the “digital afterlife” were opened.
I started to learn about QR codes printed on acrylic plaques. You can buy these, for an exorbitant price, to place on the headstones of loved ones. These have become rather popular in the last decade and the idea is quite simple. It’s just another portal to the internet. It can be placed in the corner of a gravestone (with the visible company logo) and it is impervious to destructive weather. Once scanned, the link takes you to a webpage where the family of the deceased can curate a bio, slideshow, video, or other archival document of the life of their loved one to be viewed by mourners. Viewing these digital remembrances can then become part of the formality of cemetery visits.
While in graduate school I used to wake up at 7am for a course on the philosophy of death and dying. Right away we discussed how immortality has only had four narratives throughout history. The first has been the attempt to stay alive — from an elixir that can sustain life indefinitely to scientific advances keen to prolong it, or even reversing the ageing process, every civilisation has had a hopeful story about ways to dodge eternal silence. Next, there is resurrection — mainly in religious doctrines, the possibility of the posthumous survival of the body is a common narrative for life after death. The spiritual variety is that of the soul — an immaterial survival of our inessential, disembodied selves that can live on ad infinitum. Finally, there is the idea of a legacy — to leave behind a reputation of significance, or perhaps simply passing on your genes, in order for a part of oneself to persist.
One reason why the “digital afterlife” is an appealing land is because seemingly all of these narratives are subsumed in it. I wrote an essay about all this last year, which landed me a speaking engagement where I turned it into a very cynical talk. Below is the script, which cut all the fat off a rambling and bloated screed.
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Good evening. Thank you all for being here. Welcome to the cynical and lugubrious part of the night. No intention of raising your spirits, I must say. What I can do, however, is repay your generous time and attention by telling you exactly what I think about the digital afterlife — by which I mean the virtual kingdom of immortality, capable of hosting numerous programmed versions of the human being.
I would like to issue a trinity of misgivings about the digital afterlife, all of which are ingratiating offers of pleasure, and symptoms of our permissive, technocratic age. The digital afterlife is a denial of death, an attempt to dodge the confrontation with non-being. And this is perpetuated by a self-devouring consumerism and commodification of everything, providing excesses to the sacred features of life that do not yield any contact with reality.
Consider the most primitive doorway into this virtual realm, which can now be found in graveyards. Perhaps you have seen that in the last decade, QR codes printed on acrylic plaques for headstones have become rather popular. Once scanned, the link takes you to a webpage of digital remembrances — a slideshow or videos of the deceased to be viewed by mourners.
Now, the spurious intuition at this attempt to restyle a graveyard holds more weight I think than any ambivalent or heartfelt reaction. The marketing tactics used by the companies selling these QR codes vindicate the disconcerting hunch and reveal its origin. The advertisements, mostly on the hellscape of TikTok, are from the perspective of a tombstone tourist — someone who has no relation to the deceased, but nevertheless wants to peer into the life of complete strangers. Voyeurism! The kind of pleasure Hitchcock explored in his film Rear Window. The main character played by James Stewart lives in an apartment complex in Greenwich Village, NYC that comprises one side of a square courtyard, with all of the windows of the other buildings in plain sight. He has broken his leg and his days are spent looking through binoculars into the lives of others.
Graveyard snooping can provide an analogous pleasure because the subject being viewed is not aware of being looked at. If you take Sarte’s view on death, that it is the quintessential nothingness, and inert, because among other things we lose the ability to be aware of ourselves, we can see that it is an intrusion.
And let’s not forget the glaring commercialism at play, for there are other commodities on offer. For instance, in the Remember Metaverse, a web3 virtual memorial, one can create digital headstones, purchase digital flowers, and even own digital land for commemorations of loved ones. Is the capitalistic guile palpable yet? The social ritual of mourning now prompts you to shift your attention away from the world where your feet are planted and instead enter the digital afterlife, which of course, is on your phone.
And back on the shelf of innovation there are other items to select. There are deadbots — you can upload the digital footprint of a loved one to recreate them in the form of a large language model. There are holograms to converse with, avatars as well. And these have a different, complicated form of pleasure associated with them, which comes from Jacques Lacan, called surplus enjoyment, which can be described as the pleasure sought by a subject by detours or renunciations, with no real purpose. Essentially, it follows the idea that the ultimate desire is desire itself.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek tells a story that exhibits this well. Every so often, shopping carts can be found in the United States filled to the brim with items but with nobody in sight to purchase them. The “gain of pleasure”, as it were, is not found in the definitive acquisition of the goods, but only by undertaking the process of being a consumer. The final act of buying the products is therefore rejected and a known farce. Notice how surplus enjoyment does not really mean additional pleasure, and it’s not pure, either. To push past the limit of ordinary enjoyment, Lacan said, was to engender pain. Perhaps the family that completes the bizarre shopping ritual yearns to buy all the luxurious items from the store, but they cannot afford any of them. Grief is the perfect target for such enjoyment because it’s a bewildering process filled with emotions that oscillate within the subject with great sway.
In the digital afterlife, desire appears as a motivating force in the form of the ancient longing to converse with the dead. To do this via a chatbot can be a retreat into nostalgia, the premier cocktail of pleasure and pain. It is the passive renunciation of death. As with all cases of surplus enjoyment, there’s a disappointing end. In the accounts to communicate with a dead loved one by means of a companion chatbot, users often report that the experience brought on additional gloom. Although they were able to ontologically transpose someone for a while, they die once more when you walk away.
Lastly, the nature of engagement with these AI clones is represented by the concept of interpassivity: the ability to have one’s experience externalised. AI clones offer such delegation even in a participatory experience — to let an automated program act on behalf of the user. It is the same passive engagement of when a television show is already laughing at itself, and thereby laughs for you. The chatbot or hologram aids the user in the pleasure of externalising one’s passive experiences, of emotions and feelings, thereby relieving you of the inner responsibility to bear them. It has the potential to release one from the duty to properly grieve, when instead you can externalise your sorrow through the medium of the other in a synthetic relationship.
Robert Pfaller, the philosopher who coined this term, talks about how interpassive behavior aims at avoidance, and fends off encounters with something sacred. The sacred element here is life’s ephemerality. And I am concerned, along with the philosopher Patrick Stokes, that AI clones flout the dignity of a human being. This technology does not treat humans as ends in themselves, but rather instrumentally, upon the conversion of someone to a mere communicative resource. It is not a way to remember someone, but to replace them, which implicitly devalues the subject to serve the desires of the living in a functional role. These technological variations are shifting our perception of death.
The digital afterlife is luring us into a view of death that is no longer a metaphysical limit, but rather a consumerist interrelation. The intersection of AI and death can undermine the broken, imperfect, temporal marks of human existence. And as we grant a further encroachment of our digital identities into our ontology, and allow technology to replace fundamental pieces of human agency, we must accept that we never cared about it in the first place.
Is this what being human is? Replicating oneself? The notion of Being has been the inquiry of philosophers for centuries. What does it mean for something to exist? What does it mean to experience existence? In the context of Heidegger, how do we come to understand being-in-the-world? The modern answer has certainly arrived, which is that “to be” is to be interactable; to have the ability to transcend the material world by collecting powers and pleasure in the digital one.
Thank you.
Love this!