By Nina Kruschwitz

Elaine Kasket, a psychologist with a practice based in London, is an expert on the digital afterlife. Her recent book All the Ghosts in the Machine looks at the psychosocial, legal, ethical, and practical implications of mortality in the digital age. She recently sat down with the Journal to talk about death, life, and how to balance issues of privacy and legacy.

How many dead people really are on Facebook, and how do you know?

I’ve seen research done by the Oxford Internet Institute. If Facebook were to continue growing at its current rate, which is about 13 percent per year, by the end of century it would include 4.9 billion dead people. Various projections say the tipping point for more dead people being on Facebook than live ones would be reached mid-century.

So, slightly creepy, but why does it matter?

When I spoke with Jed Brubaker at Facebook he said, “Well, there’s more money to be made in amusement parks than cemeteries.”

The point is we are entrusting huge amounts of data and memorabilia and artifacts from our lives to formats that we can not control or make decisions about. These big behemoth tech platforms are not historians or archivists or humanitarians. They’re profit making companies. And when it does become more cemetery than amusement park and the financial incentives lessen, they will jettison that data because it’s so expensive to store.

And then my concern is both at an individual or family level and a historical level. What are the short term and longer term consequences of having a kind of early 21st century digital dark ages where huge swathes of the citizenry leave behind very little because of changes in hardware or software coding and the rise or fall of various companies? Everybody has this conceit that online is forever and the cloud is infinite and binary code will always be retrievable and it is simply not the case.

Is that happening now? What would happen to your Facebook account if you died tomorrow?

Flickr started culling its free accounts back in February with very little fanfare. And if you say, oh well let’s just migrate everything — stuff gets lost, as happened with MySpace in May.

Facebook now uses AI to figure out which profiles are dead people’s accounts, and they memorialize profiles so that, as Brubaker put is, “we can stop doing things that are pain points for the bereaved.” That’s fascinating to me because they’ve decided in a kind of nannying, top-down way what is and is not good for us, whether we should or should not experience pain and bereavement, and what will cause that pain for people. It’s a supremely powerful move that takes us into new territory.

It’s a strange idea, but it seems in keeping with the current cultural aversion to death.

Which is relatively recent. The sociologist Phillipe Aries named four stages or ages of death: the first one in the Middle Ages was “tamed death” when you were sort of cheek by jowl with death, it was familiar. There were no individual accountings of life or inscriptions on tombstones and the like. Then came the era of one’s own death, when it became very personal and individual, you made an accounting to God of your life. After that there was an age where there was a tremendous amount of sorrow for the deaths of the other, a kind of romanticized, fetishized perspective, a non-acceptance of death and a longing to maintain communication with the dead. And that led to the age of forbidden death, where death is kind of privatized and denied, it’s this horrible event we want to prevent at all costs, and yet avoid even discussing.

Michael Hvid Jacobsen has proposed a fifth stage that says we’re in the age of spectacular death. It’s a spectacle: close and visible and available to us, partly because the dead are all over the online world. At the same time death is further from us because it’s mediated through our devices.

Which started with television probably, right?

Yes, I think about the Vietnam War, where you were suddenly seeing film clips of people getting blown up on TV. That’s just continued. You can have this weird experience of sitting in your room drinking your tea and watching a terrorist attack.

The spectacle isn’t just about the gruesome terror and fear inducing thing that we’re talking about, but the fact that you encounter the dead easily on the same platforms, by the same devices, by the same means, and in the same digital places and spaces that you interacted with them before they died. They stay there for an indeterminate period of time because as you know, there are no virtual carrion beetles or digital worms that go around nibbling away all traces of you after you’re not around.

In the exercise you’re conducting at the House of Beautiful Business this year, people will write eulogies for strangers based on what they find online. At this point, I’m guessing they’ll find a lot.

Exactly. You’re not the only one responsible for your digital reflection. People will tag you on Facebook, on LinkedIn, all kinds of organizations have records of you — it’s stunning how much is out there. But it’s all mediated by technology. And at this point, the question for me is, when we sign up for a platform like Facebook, we are essentially entrusting them with our memories, our personal identifiable data — in essence we’re appointing them to manage our estates. If you’ve ever been the executor of an estate you know how complex it can get. Historically the dead have not been granted rights to privacy. But right now platforms can freely use the data of the deceased for their own purposes, for market insight mining, or training a new AI, or whatever. They can dissolve a contract with the deceased person when it suits them, and keep it when it does. The law is a lot more sluggish than technology, and there are no clear solutions right now.

Can you give me an example of when the law itself — or lack thereof — has caused grief to the bereaved?

There are many of them. I spoke with one woman whose daughter’s page had been memorialized by Facebook, who said “I gave birth to her, it’s still her birthday, and I still want to get reminders that she was born on this day.” She wasn’t given the choice.

There was a young woman in her early 20s, a hairdresser, who died tragically at a young age. She’d been very active in a raft of issues that were important to her, and her page gave a vivid reflection of her. There were thousands of photos on her site, and many expressions of condolence. But 72 of those pictures were of her ex-boyfriend, her killer. Her parents were wanted to sort out her Facebook page and deal with those photos. When they tried to, the site had been memorialized and locked down. Even though her sister had the password, they couldn’t use it.

What have you changed in your own life in light of what your book research uncovered?

I became very cynical. I tried to limit my Facebook presence. But I live far from my point of origin; most of my family is across the Atlantic, and I have a young daughter and I want her to know them. Facebook is what they use. There are other mechanisms, but family members still post photos I share through other channels, like a shared photo album, and tag them on Facebook.

A few months ago I sat down with my daughter and asked her how she felt about my “sharenting” practices. Not only did she want me to make changes in what I do going forward, but there were many historical posts that she wanted to go through and delete. For example, she had once seen a photo I posted of a sign she had made, and she got very upset, which prompted a whole deep discussion. She feels like lots of posts about her have been posted without her permission, or before she could give informed permission. It’s hard to go back through and edit privacy settings when there are thousands of posts to consider — there’s currently no way of reverting all past posts to specific audiences.

What bothers you most about that lack of control?

Two things. First is the kind of expectations we set up for children in what we share and what gets reinforced by others who see those photos. For example, when we visited relatives one of them asked my daughter what her favorite song was, and when she answered he was disappointed and said “Oh, I thought you were a [David] Bowie girl.” It was like she’d given the wrong answer. And you know, children who have access to all those photos and posts later see what their parents’ hopes and expectations or assumptions were for them. It can be pretty powerful.

A friend of mine has been posting all kinds of photos of his baby son, and someone suggested he give him his own Facebook page. That’s just enabling facial recognition and marketing preferences for your child from the word go. And when they graduate to having a profile of their own, that identity will be linked through facial recognition and there will be continuity of all of their preferences. We’re basically laying our children open to the future manipulations of extremely sophisticated AI, which is a completely razor sharp marketing focus on just one person. That is what’s coming.